Building a Mobile App for Gather
As part of UXAcademy's Product Design course, I worked on a user-friendly mobile app which could be used to arrange a gathering in a mutually convenient location. This app, Gather, would recommend venues and experiences in a central location, which met the preferences of the group.
Discovery
Understanding our users
Because Gather was a start-up in stealth mode, meaning it hadn't gone live yet, our first task was to understand our users and how they currently find common locations to meet with groups. In order to achieve this we did user interviews.
We talked to 15 people aged 25-35 about their experiences and motives, how often and how many people they tend to meet, modes of transportation, amongst others.
From these sessions we found out that:
- Participants trusted their friends to find their own way, so they cared about the venue, not how to get there
- Participants currently use a multitude of apps to organise a night out
- Pricing factors are important, including budgeting and bill splitting
- Deciding a venue to meet up which makes everyone happy takes some thought
We also found some direct and indirect competitors such as Planerr, Design my night and Yelp
Design Iterations
To serve the needs of the users, we hypothesised that:
- By providing inspiration and saving venues for later in a wish list, users can decided on a venue quicker
- We can remove the travel time for others, so the user can focus on their own travel time
- We can remove billing in the app, as we can rely on integrations with 3rd party services for functionality and user trust
User Journey
We focused first on the main journeys the users would need to take when using the app. After several iterations, we settled on this flow:
We called out the main features we decided could have the biggest impact to focus on. These were:
- Login / Signup
- Profile / Settings
- Create event
- Upcoming events
Once this was done, we distributed the tasks amongst ourselves so we could each focus on one, working in parallel. I worked on designing the "create event" journey.
Wireframing
I started from the most important part of creating an event, the venue. As such I created a listing page where users could search for venues by relevant filters, including budget and location. Each venue on this list could then be shared to an in-app chat to be discussed with the others, as usually it takes a little back and forth to come to an agreement.
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To make selecting a venue even easier, I designed a Tinder-style browsing, in which the user could swipe left to reject, down to save to which list, or right to share in the chat.
Once a venue is in the chat, each member can vote yes or no to a venue. If at least one says no, it gets rejected and new one in proposed. If all agree, then the "organising" user can book the venue in the app or elsewhere.
Delivering the project
After putting the wireframes together from all of us, we connected them into a prototype. We also planned a next step of usability testing to validate the new designs.
Unfortunately we ran out of time within the course, and ended up delivering the final presentation and materials to the client without this.