Team:

• 1 Designer(Me), 1 Researcher and 1 Developer

CONTEXT

Uni students are losing friendships term by term

It seems like socialising in class is the most common way to form friendships rather than anything else. Yes, we went to lecture/tutorials, we say hello to each other when we met, we also stick together when we were doing group assignments. But really, how long can the friendship sustains after the class is gone? You pick up your phone seeing those avatars, but don’t know what to say.

“Once the semester ends, I’ll get lost with everyone else” said a UQ local undergrad.

Solution

Sharing time together is the key

Hypothesis & Primary Research

What makes a good friend?

I divided the process of making friends into two steps: Step1. being exposed to a stranger, Step2. enough interaction with this stranger to become friends. Through the survey, I aimed to understand how students make friends, identify in which stage where they encounter difficulties and explore the reasons behind these challenges.

Example questions:

In uni, which occasions do you prefer for making friends?

What might hinder you from initiating conversations with others?

Are you willing to initiate contact with classmates you got along with last semester?

What is your motivation for participating in on campus events?

Research Insights

3 Key Takeaways

From 7 casual interviews and 40 survey responses, we learned that most students do have attempted to connect with their peers. However, students found it hard to get adequate friendships because:

• More students find it challenging to maintain friendships rather than making. The difficulty lies in the fact that when the connection is not deep enough, the friendship tends to end.

• Students are willing to reconnect with past classmates they got along with. However, they find challenging to do so because of a lack of opportunities for contact.

• Everyone has different timetables which reduces interaction time, making it hard to cultivate friendships.

Given the insights we gained, how might we foster strong friendships among students to prevent them from losing each other?

Persona

A 21 Years Old Science Student

Start to design

Attempts on NFT System and Restart

At first, we found that students only go to events when there’s free item or their friends are going to the same event, or the event lies in their interest. So, combing these 3 motivators, our team come up with an idea of incentivizing students to go to events with their friends by using NFTs. Events are pushed based on algorithm and their preference they filled in at the begining. Students can get NFTs when they go to classes/events with friends, and they can consume NFTs to get free items like a boba on campus.

But through furthur discussion with our users, we found that this is a not very healthy system. Students should be able to step out of their comfort zones by their own intention, rather than being driven by incentives. We realised it may not the best way to help students to cultivate meaningful friendships. Also it’s very hard to implement it in the backend to get all event details on campus.

Iterations

Improvements on Scheduling

final screens

The Refined Prototype

Design System

reflection

MVP rather than adding multiple immersive functions

Through out this project, I feel like it's really challenging for one app to cater to everything at once, because add one feature often means compromising elsewhere. At first, I wanted to solve the whole friending problem by establishing a huge system, I made the whole friending journey on my application (from the dating app like swiping other users’ profiles to maintaining friendship by going to events)

Therefore, in the later stage of the project, I assess the Minimum Viable Product plan for the product rather than attempting to handle multiple features simultaneously. This approach will aid me in designing a usable and interactive user flow from start to finish.