Meetup
UX/UI concept project, creating a new feature for the Meetup app
the brief:
Meet up is an online platform designed to organise online groups and events. They believe that there is a massive untapped market of apprehensive users who sign up for events but end up not attending. Our challenge was to build a feature that will help and encourage passive users to conquer their fears and anxieties, turning them from passive into active users.
DURATION: 2 week sprint (April 2022)
TEAM: Part of a team of 4 UX designers
MY ROLE: I was involved in all stages of the end to end UX process, but was especially involved in the interviews, creating the prototypes, iterations and the presentation design.
TOOLS & SOFTWARE: Pen & paper, Google Forms, Figma, Zoom, Maze, Trello, Slack, Zoom
Read the full case study on my Medium page
PROCESS
understanding the user and market
Conducted competitive and comparative analysis, studying the features of 3 direct competitors and gathered inspiration from these platforms and other related sites.
Opportunity for Meetup to set themselves apart: Connecting members via events and helping reduce users anxiety before an event, which the competition do not provide.
Surveyed 12 and interviewed 4 users Learning that individuals tend to miss events they are interested in for 2 main reasons:
-
They are anxious about going alone
-
They have anxiety about their lack of knowledge regarding the possible content of the event
defining the problem
Based on our user research we built 2 personas with a primary persona, Jamie, who gets anxious attending events by himself.
Created a user journey and empathy map for Jamie to identify opportunities to lessen his pain points and formed his problem statement:
Jamie needs a familiar face to attend events with, because he feels anxious going alone.
The key ‘how might we’ became: HMW help Jamie to connect with another attendee before the event?
Testing and ideating solutions
Held a design studio, collaborating to form our solution.
We decided upon a ‘buddy’ system which appears on each event page and users can opt into. If they choose to 'buddy up,' they will be added to a group chat with other attendees before the event.
With the help of Meetup’s design system, we turned our sketches into a high - fidelity wireframe.
Ran usability tests including a Maze test and iterated on our prototype.
OUTCOME
Screen flow, starting from an Event page, showing the user joining the event and opting to ‘Buddy up.’
The user can find more info about ‘Buddy up’ in two locations and can opt in or out easily.
Screen flow showing the user getting a notification that they have been added to their Buddy group chat, going to the chat, and starting the conversation with the Buddy bot ice breaker question.
Watch the final prototype in action!
conclusion
Looking back, the brief was to convert passive users into active users. We personified our user research in Jamie who signs up to events but doesn't end up going because he has anxiety when he doesn't know anyone else attending.
Our solution, the ‘Buddy up’ feature will help alleviate this anxiety by allowing Jamie to chat to other attendees before the event so he’ll have a friendly face when he gets there.
This feature seamlessly fits into the Meetup app, is intuitive to navigate and is flexible for users, giving them the ability to change the opt in or out status.
reflections
This was my first group project on the course and it was a great learning experience applying the agile working methodologies to the UX process.
It was interesting to come across points of contention, but we ensured that everyone’s voice was heard and we would resolve these with discussion and sometimes a vote.
I recognise the true value in keeping organised with a Kanban, having a timeline with ‘definition of done’ for each task, and holding stand ups each day.
These were valuable lessons to learn before our live client project.
MORE PROJECTS
