Timeline ⏰
August 2024 - December 2024
Project Type 💻
Solo Personal Project
The Problem & Inspiration:
My first UX personal project was started during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. During this time, everyone in my social life had vastly different responsibilities, making it was hard to plan times to meet, whether that be physical in-person hangouts or phone calls with family living far away. Busy individuals with things going on in many different avenues of their life (social, professional, familial, etc.) need a way to effectively schedule meetups.
Additionally, social media elements have become a part of almost every aspect of our daily lives. For instance, products like Apple's Find My and Snapchat utilize a user's location to enhance connectivity and interaction. However, no product has effectively integrated the calendar into social media.
Preliminary Research & Takeaways:
To better understand the needs of potential users of a social calendar and scheduling application, I conducted five user interviews. The goal of these interviews was to gauge the problems that different individuals faced while coordinating meetups and managing their time across various responsibilities. The two research methods I used when conducting these user interviews were mapping and semi-structured interview questions. The semi-structured nature of the questions left room for follow up questions after my prepared questions, and mapping allowed the users to draw/map out their previous experiences to help both me and themselves visualize and understand them better.
These interviews also helped in trying to identify whether or not users are receptive to the idea of bringing social media elements into a calendar application. Additionally, there were questions covering potential features of the application and questions about demographics. Below there are some examples of prepared interview questions asked:
Differing Contexts:
"How (if at all) is the planning and scheduling process different based on the social context (ex. professional vs friends)?"
Current Methods/Tools:
"What methods and/or tools do you use to schedule and plan events? Please describe them in depth."
Typical Process:
"Can we start by talking about how a typical social plan, in your
After I transcribed their interviews, I coded the responses by identifying reoccurring themes. I then organized the codes into an affinity map to visually group related ideas and come up with three insights. I then used those three findings to create a user persona and user journey map.
Insights + Final Research Deliverables
1️⃣ Busy individuals face challenges coordinating events due to conflicts, different event types, and varying planning methods. It is hard for them to account and plan differently for professional and social events and manage scheduling when their peers also have many obligations.
2️⃣ Busy individuals utilize digital tools to both plan and schedule both social and professional events because of their flexibility. These online tools can be for scheduling, planning, or keeping track of events. Users like how accessible these tools are.
3️⃣ Busy individuals often use online calendar tools because of their features such as descriptions and invitations. They view an online calendar tool as a necessity when it comes to managing their busy lives.
User Persona
After conducting my qualitative research, I used all of the insights gained to create a final user persona to help guide the solution creation process.
User Journey Map
I also created a user journey map at the end of my research process to identify the biggest pain points that users have in the planning and scheduling process.
Competitors
Some of the common competitors include Google Calendar and When2Meet which are often used in personal and professional contexts. Additionally, TimeTree is another comparable competitor that is used more in social settings. However, while most of the competitors on the market have ways to organize events into a digital calendar, none of them feature user profiles, meaning that none of them bring the elements of a social network into a digital calendar tool.
“It’s sometimes hard for me to plan, schedule, and keep track of all of the different events I have going on in a week. ”
Design Process
Sketches
I began the design process by creating some digital ideation sketches for the sign-in page and five of the main pages represented by the five icons on the bottom navigation bar.
Low Fidelity
I then developed the ideation sketches into a low-fidelity prototype for the sign in, home, group chats, add friends, calendar, and profile pages. I then created the happy path for adding a new event to the calendar.
Feedback
Throughout the entire process, and especially when I was taking my low-fidelity prototype and making it high fidelity, I took feedback from fellow designers, users, and my instructors. Here are some revisions I made to my designs based on their feedback.
Prominence of Social Features
User feedback revealed that the social features of this app needed to be more prominent in the design. I then incorporated icons and features from commonly used social media platforms such as Instagram to make them easily recognizable, and thus more prominent.
Color Scheme
I wanted to give an app a cohesive, yet recognizable color scheme. I played around with a few and asked users for feedback, and eventually decided on a purple and blue color scheme.
Features
Another hard part of designing this app was prioritizing what features to include and which of them to design. Ultimately, since the social features are one of the most unique parts of the solution, I decided to design more of that part of the app out, rather than the calendar features.
Blur
In order to make the frames more clear, I added a blur effect to overlay the confirmation box over the new event page. This prompts users to exit from this page.
High Fidelity Design
I then developed my low fidelity prototype into a high fidelity one. This process including adding potential branding and style as well as color and text to the design.
Users can create, manage, and share events
Users can post and share pictures of their events
Next Steps
There was only brief informal usability testing done so far in this project when I was seeking feedback from peers. Having more structured usability testing will help user feedback fuel iterations and design changes to the prototype. Additionally, there needs to be more designs implemented. The current design focuses on event creation and the social features of the app, but future designs can focus more on the calendar features. Moreover, only the happy path was designed for, so there is room to expand on sad paths, which can be uncovered through further usability testing.
Main Takeaways
User research needs to be specific
One of the biggest things that I learned throughout this process, specifically when conducting user interviews, is that the questions have to be very specific in order for the users to accurately understand what you are trying to say. Additionally, many of the interviewees did not know what constituted as a “meetup” or what counted as a “social event”, so it is important to clarify meanings so that the interview data is accurate.
User feedback will conflict
One of the hardest parts of the project was synthesizing the user interview questions into insights because there was often answers that conflicted with each other. I learned how to identify patterns closer and tried to segment users by different characteristics when trying to analyze the results.
Accessibility needs to ALWAYS be a priority
Accessibility truly does need to be a part of every step of the design process. While there were efforts taken to make sure the designs were accessible such as putting colors into a contrast checker, in the future, I would like to implement more accessibility checks during every phase of the design process and consider accessibility more in my user research process as well.