Project Type: Educational Project/Concept
My role: Sole UX/UI Designer & Researcher
Timeline: March 2023
The Challenge
Making friends as a young adult can be difficult. This is a time when it is common to move locations and change careers frequently, which makes forming genuine, long-lasting connections hard. It doesn't help that more people are now working from home, resulting in even less in-person contact than before. As a young adult in a new city myself, I was inspired to spend time researching and designing solutions for this challenge.
Introducing Circle, a purpose-built community app designed to help young adults discover and connect with social communities in their neighborhoods. Some of its features include:
Curated monthly events: Over 10 high-quality events each month, hosted by professional organizers who are fairly compensated, ensuring engaging and meaningful experiences for members.
Intimate community sizes: To foster genuine friendships, Circle limits each community to 30 members, making it easier to maintain connections and build deeper relationships.
Seamless scheduling: A calendar feature that lets users easily share their availability, helping event organizers plan gatherings that fit everyone’s schedule for maximum participation and convenience.
Secondary Resarch
Through my secondary research, I discovered that experiencing difficulty making friends as a young adult is an extremely common problem in the US. Feelings of loneliness are worst for people between the age of 18 and 29, and this demographic is only getting lonelier with each passing generation. Some factors contributing to the problem include:
A lack of time: The path to meaningful friendship requires significant time investment: research shows it takes approximately 50 hours of interaction to form a casual friendship, and over 200 hours to develop a close bond. For young adults focused on career growth and facing burnout, this time commitment can feel overwhelming.
A lack of trust: Unlike childhood friendships that form organically, adult relationships are complicated by increased self-awareness and fear of judgment. Young adults often struggle to open themselves to new connections, weighed down by concerns of rejection that weren't present in their younger years.
A lack of initiative: The transition to adult friendships demands a level of proactive effort that most people aren't prepared for. Without the built-in social structures of school or organized activities, young adults must learn to navigate friendship-building in entirely new ways – a skill that's rarely taught or discussed.
User Interviews
I conducted in-depth interviews with six young adults (ages 20-30) who were experiencing difficulty forming friendships. Participants were recruited through a targeted social media survey and interviewed via Zoom to understand their friendship-building experiences, challenges, and needs.
Through these conversations, several consistent patterns emerged that shaped my design direction:
Proximity & Life Stage Matter: Participants expressed a strong preference for local friendships with peers in similar life stages, highlighting the importance of geographical and generational compatibility.
Quality of Life Impact: The desire for more friendships was deeply tied to overall life satisfaction. Participants viewed meaningful friendships not just as social connections, but as essential components of a fulfilling life.
Time Management Challenges: While participants valued friendship, competing priorities and misaligned schedules created significant barriers. The time investment required to nurture new relationships often felt overwhelming amid other life responsibilities.
Connection Depth Gap: While meeting new people comes easily, participants struggled with the harder task of turning these casual encounters into meaningful friendships.
Affinity Mapping & Personas
To translate user insights into actionable design guidance, I synthesized the interview findings into two distinct personas, each capturing key patterns in pain points and motivations that emerged from my research.
Ideate
How Might We Statements:
Building on my research findings, I formulated four How Might We (HMW) statements. This activity helped shift my mindset from focusing on the problem to focusing on solutions. The HMW statements, combined with the user personas, served as the foundation for the rest of my brainstorming and ideation process.
How might we help young adults find time for making new friends?
How might we help young adults feel more confident when meeting new people?
How might we make it easier to build lasting connections?
How might we create a welcoming community environment?
Brainstorming
To initiate the design process, I conducted a brainstorming session to quickly generate a wide range of ideas. Within a time frame of 15 minutes, I sketched out 12 potential solutions to address the HMW statements. Several of these ideas ultimately found their place in the final design.
User Stories
To identify the app's key functionalities, I created user stories based on user needs and prioritized them as high (must-haves), medium (nice-to-haves), and low (optional). This helped define the core features for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The top 4 user stories were:
As a user, I would like to easily find local communities to minimize travel time and increase the likelihood of attending events.
As a user, I prefer being part of communities with fewer than 30 members, aiming for easier friendship building, maintenance, and a closer-knit atmosphere.
As a user, I wish to search for communities with members of the same age, enhancing the probability of connecting with people who share similar interests and experiences.
As a community host, I need the ability to view the calendar availability of community members, allowing me to plan events that align with their schedules.
User Flows
I created three user flows to highlight the key goals users can achieve in the Circle app. This exercise was crucial in narrowing the project scope and identifying the app's most important features:
Join a community
Share availability via calendar
Create an event
Sketches
After defining the core user flows, I began translating them into rough sketches. This exploratory phase allowed me to rapidly iterate on different navigation patterns and interface layouts, laying the foundation for my wireframes and final designs. Through quick sketching, I was able to visualize how users would move through the app and test different approaches to solving their key pain points.
Design
Mid-Fi Wireframes
To kickstart the design process, I created wireframes to outline the content and structure of each user flow. These wireframes helped establish the overall layout and hierarchy of elements on each screen. By visually mapping out the user interface at this stage, I gained a clearer understanding of the user journey and ensured a solid foundation for subsequent design iterations.
Brand platform & Mood board
In order to establish a distinct brand identity that sets Circle apart from competitors, I created a brand platform and mood board. Having a clear and unique brand identity is not only helpful to create strong ties with the end users but it was also helpful for me to reflect and get to know the product I was designing on a deeper level.
Style Guide
To ensure visual consistency across the Circle app, I created a style guide that provided a reference point for recurring design elements. This streamlined the design process and made it easy to maintain coherence and continuity in the app's visual aesthetics.
I chose the primary color "earth yellow" because I wanted the app to have a warm and welcoming feel, which is appropriate for a community-based app that helps people make friends. The secondary color light blue is complementary to earth yellow and also conveys trust and sincerity, two important attributes I wanted associated with the app.
I chose Gilroy as the font for its modern, clean aesthetic, which perfectly complements the youthful and fresh vibe of the Circle app. It is also highly legible and accessible, ensuring that the app's content is easy to read and navigate for users.
Hi Fidelity UI's
I believe a visually appealing user interface is essential for delivering a great user experience. With this in mind, I invested considerable time and effort in creating UI designs that would be enjoyable for users to interact with. The groundwork I laid in the wireframing phase paid off significantly during this phase, as I retained the majority of the structure and layout without any changes. This enabled me to focus fully on the creative aspects, such as choosing colors, fonts, and imagery. Overall, I found this part of the process to be highly rewarding, as it provided me with the opportunity to bring my creative vision to life.
Test
Usability testing
Before conducting usability tests, I created a Research Plan and Testing Script to guide the process. The main goal was to assess whether users could complete core tasks within the prototype and identify areas for improvement.
I recruited 5 participants, aged 20 to 35, who were open to using an app to meet new people, and conducted Moderated Usability Testing over Zoom. Participants were asked to complete three tasks:
Task 1: Imagine you have recently moved to a big city and you are looking to meet new people who live close by. Show me how you would find and join a community via the app.
Task 2: You are a member of the community and want to let the community know what times you are available so that it can be taken into consideration when someone is scheduling a new event. Go ahead and indicate in the app that you are unavailable on Mondays and also add availability on Thursdays from 7:30 to 9:30 pm.
Task 3: You want to create a new event on Sunday, April 9th at 1 PM, and you also want to make sure that the majority of members are available at this time. How would you go about doing this?
Issues & Solutions
Although all users were able to complete the tasks with little to no extra instructions, a few things stood out as clear areas for improvement.
Finding 1:
Problem: Users expected to be able to click the dates in the calendar
Solution: Changed the prototype to allow users to click on the calendar to create events. Everything still looks the same, but now users can click on the calendar and it will take them to the 'new event' screen
Finding 2:
Problem: Users expected to be able to create events from the home screen
Solution: Added a 'new event' button to the home screen so the user can create an event from there as well as the calendar tab.
Finding 3:
Problem: Users felt overwhelmed by information on the ‘view availability’ scree
Solution: Simplified the information on the 'view availability' screen. I removed one line of text that was repetitive and moved the percentage indicator to the bottom of the screen. I also made the instruction text at the top bigger. The goal was to create less information overload for the user and increase the likelihood of the user actually reading the instruction sentence at the top.
Reflect
Final Thoughts
This project has been a valuable learning experience throughout the entire UX design process. As the sole UX/UI designer, I gained hands-on experience at every stage, which allowed me to deepen my understanding of the field.
The User Interviews and Usability Testing were especially insightful, teaching me how to craft effective questions, provide the right level of information, and build genuine connections without influencing responses. Each conversation helped me refine my skills as a UX researcher.
If I could do it all over again, there are a few things I would do differently:
Allowing more time for ideation: Ideation was one of the more challenging parts of the process and it felt like the process concluded too swiftly. While the objective is to avoid overthinking, I wish I would have taken a bit more time to brainstorm in multiple sessions so I could have come up with a broader range of potentially better ideas.
Choosing a more manageable project scope: While I love the idea for my app, if I were to do it over again I might choose something simpler. The original idea included a lot more features, but due to time constraints, I had to significantly limit the scope. As a result, the final product is only a small part of what I originally envisioned.
I’m grateful for this opportunity and excited to apply these lessons to future projects as I continue to grow as a UX designer.