Funner
A serious app with a cheerful personality
By Anastasia Egorina, UI/UX designer at Rosberry
Does the word ‘hobby-horsing’ make sense to you? It does to Funner users. Funner is an easy-to-use and simple app to help you organize an unusual event, invite friends and stave off boredom.
Do you want to organize a soccer match among board-game fans, a costume party for those who love Star Wars or go to the cinema with your schoolmates who love horror films or even try to take part in something interesting during weekends? Funner is there to help you make those searches easy, fast, funny and meaningful.
The problem we solve
Boredom, as psychologists say, is the lack of incentive, the feeling of being unsatisfied with what you do. People can not deal with boredom for a long time. One of the reasons for it is the lack of hobbies. Some people find it difficult to come up with an activity to entertain themselves, some hope others would organize something creative.
Teresa Belton, the researcher who studies boredom phenomenon, says: ‘there are people who lack interior resources to deal with boredom creatively, they can end up with something destructive to fill out emptiness.’
It is the problem of boredom that we’ve tried to resolve with our client.
Find an activity for yourself
Our target audience is high schoolers and students. Studying our users we’ve come to understand that more often than not they prefer using something out-of-the-box and do not like spending much time to create anything new. Their needs must be satisfied quickly otherwise they lose their interest.
So right from the first app screen we propose that they choose an out-of-the-box event which already has a description, a number of the would-be participants and even a location where the event is supposed to take place. The only thing you should do is add participants.
To get a user interested in creating an event we have designed possible ideas as large-size cards with the pictures of unusual activities.
If searching for an event a user has been inspired by the ideas and invented something on their own, they can create their own event from scratch.
Create your own event
Creating a custom event is one of the crucial functions of the app. It’s important to make this process easy and straightforward. We’ve introduced a question/answer approach to create an event: the app asks and a user answers. As a result of it, there is an event created and added to the tab My plans.
Your plans
Through the tab titled ‘My plans’ an initiator (our user) may see the status of the events to come: how many vacancies are there, how many people have agreed to take part in it and how many declined an invite. All this information is there without going to the ‘Event’ screen.
Your profile
It was absolutely necessary to get a user interested in filling in the profile. The user info helps to tailor the events to the user’s interests and to ensure that the app itself works in the best possible way.
So, we’ve come up with the Funnometer. The meter shows the level of your activity in the app.
The idea behind it is very simple: the more fields in the profile are filled out and the more activity you’ve shown creating events and participating in them — the higher is the level! Interaction between the users is based on similarities of their hobbies and interests. We ask the users to choose the tags for the system to know what they are interested in and ask to add the best moment photos taken during the events, so that they could see how active they are.
We’ve called such photos ‘heroshots’. We’ve used some gamification to make the users interested in scoring points. The higher is the Funnometer level, the more chances the user has to find the events which fit or like-minded people.
Finding the users with something in common (age, location, interests), Funner lets them group together.
Your are not alone
It’s not that easy for some people to find friends especially outside their group or social circle. At the same time many of us want to expand their social network and meet new people. Users can group together based on different attributes: schools, universities, age and, of course, interests. Each can create their own event among the users of the same age, from the same school or among those who have the same interests, for example, interested in medieval martial arts or MMA.
All these processes should not be boring, so we’ve done our best to make the app fun-filled and the routine steps entertaining.
Joking
Humour allows us to establish light and jolly relations with our users. Funny illustrations attract attention to important information, make it more retainable and charge the users with positive energy even if a message has a negative connotation (search fail, no result). Humour has a cushion effect on negative emotions when there are fails, and enhances happiness when the users get awards.
We know our users and are sure they will appreciate it, so we’ve boldly seasoned the app with jokes and humour.
Humour always helps and makes everything compulsory fun-filled and everything routine enjoyable.
Communication
We have built trust-based and warm relationships with the client within the project. Given that the app is filled with fun, our team had a good chance to make a time of it while demonstrating and delivering the preliminary results to the client.
During the demos in the style of the Lord of the Rings we showed how an event is created through the story of the Fellowship of the Ring with Gandalf and his little hobbits taking part. Using the story of Harry Potter we showed how Hermione Granger joined “The School of Witchcraft and Wizardry” group where she could find the fans of magic among her own schoolmates.
As exemplified by the above scenarios we can see that the ideas of the events might be really different. Your own imagination is the only limit.
What next?
We are in for another mighty development milestone which is about creating a feature-set to let users share their impressions about the events and motivate other users to take part in and create their own events.
This app is available in App Store & Google Play and is currently focused on the Utah, USA market.
