The amount of social connection directly influences one’s mental and physical health. According to research done by Stanford University, People who feel more connected to others have lower levels of anxiety and depression. We focused on designing an app that allows busy college students to connect with their friends easily.

So how to make social connections less of a burden? 

Considering this “burden” in-depth, I realized it is not only a time-consuming burden, but also an emotional burden. The nature of social connection requires responsiveness from both parties. Therefore, the best relationship should be formed organically. 

Fast, intuitive, and organic 

The most common line we heard from our user interview is “texting to schedule takes so much time.” We decided to address this issue by finding an alternative to texting. This alternative should take no time and requires minimal action from the users (one action). Therefore, we created a large call-to-action button on the home screen. Instead of considering who to text to and who is available, clicking on this button eliminates the need to go through that thought process as it directs the users to a page where they can see people that are available.

The fear of rejection…one of our deepest human fears 

After solving the problem of inefficient communication, I delved deeper into the user experience on a more psychological level. People fear being alone. Receiving rejections after being cut off may easily lead to the conclusion of being unlovable. This fear is known as Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). I figured that to relieve this emotional burden from our users when connecting, we have to make our connection process as mutual and equal as possible: both parties should have the same wish and responsiveness to connect.

“activate” feature to provide a rejection-free space 

Only people who choose to connect with other people can enter our connecting “space” and see other people who are free and activated at the moment. This feature eliminates the anxiety of waiting for people to text back (which might take hours) and the hesitation before connecting certain people because of the fear of hearing “no” from them.

Any app dealing with social connections need a large user base. Here is a memorable quote from our initial user testing that echoes this idea. 

“I would use the app if my friends are using it.” 

So…how do we attract people to use our app? 

The journey should not only be intuitive, it should also be delightful and fun. We decided address this design principle primarily with our UI design,

adding playfulness to the user journey

I am inspired by apps that perfectly incorporate theme and functionality. We settled down on a spacey theme as our app focused on providing an organic and mutual social space. 

While my partner worked on creating logos and experimenting different color scheme, I worked on “spacifying” our initial UX design.

I created the current button echoing the space theme and our mascot bear astronaut.

I came up with the idea of displaying personal labels in the user profile page as different planets.

Because our app combined the idea of constellation and social connection. The idea is that when people are connecting with their friends, they are exploring each other’s universe. The planets in the universe is the traits they would like their friends to know.

The other reason I made this design is because I realized that people don’t usually use the profile feature to describe themselves in exiting social media. One reason is that these social medias did not stress on making this page beautiful and make the users want to use them.

Before and after I made the “edit universe” feature more relevant to our theme

I also created a bear astronaut for our app. Because I think an I would feel closer to an app if there is an image guiding me through my user journey. I would feel like I am not only interacting with an indifferent app that merely serves my goal of connecting with my friends. I choose bear because the color of orange matches our secondary color orange. Moreover, cartoonish bear is a common image that users can relate to.

The question that comes with attracting people to come is.. How do we make them stay? 

I considered this problem as how to incentivize to our users. I decided to adopt a common and successful practice used by many apps such as Starbucks and Snapchat:

offering rewards to users.

The rewards I came up are badges with specific space theme that could be displayed on the user’s profile page. The badges will accumulate based on frequency of usage.

statistics of connection time

During user testing, one user suggested us to include information about their connections so that they can have a better sense of their interpersonal relationships. I took inspiration from iphone’s “screen time” function that shows statistics on my screen usage. Those straightforward data would influence people’s behavior implicitly. Therefore, I incorporated a “connection data” section on the user profile page that shows connection time fluctuations between users and their friends. 

• Working through the process, I began to understand the complexity of product design. As a designer, I need to consider different interactions between the users and the app and address all of them with my design. For example, what if the uses don’t like the default setting of the activation time, therefore we need a page to allow them to choose their own activation time.

• One thing that could be done better is more emphasize on the user testing process. Because as designers, it is hard for us to really put ourselves in the users’ shoes. Therefore, we should always consult our users when we reach stagnation. For example, we had a lot of discussion on whether to include the navigation bar on the first page. We eventually reached consensus after doing user testing.

• I learned from the process that design is a process about constant improving and refining. It is really important to always look at my work with fresh eyes.