Joinn – a platform to build meaningful connections, engage in purposeful conversations, and attend events in your local communities.
I worked as a Product Designer at Joinn, leading the product strategy and design for Joinn's mobile MVP. Throughout my 6 months time at Joinn, I had the chance to work on so many aspects of the product timeline as a junior designer, including taking the product from 0 to 1.
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TIMELINE
6 Months
PLATFORM
iOS, Mobile
RESPONSIBILITIES
Discovery, user research, wireframing, prototyping, design
Making new friends as an adult is displeasingly difficult.
The CEO and creator of Joinn first moved to the Bay area for his Software Engineer job not knowing a single body. The countless Facebook groups he joined and Meetup events he attended in hopes of creating new lasting friendships only left him with unfulfilled experiences.
Curious to see if others felt the same way, we've discovered through our research and surveying that many people aren't alone in this experience.
Evite Study March 2019; n=2000
PROBLEM
Working professionals struggle to create interconnecting friendships in their local communities due to the lack of intimate & relevant conversations on their current platforms - leaving them feeling isolated and lonely.
How can we create a space for people to unite locally so that these individuals can bond on a deeper level?
The experience, between today's social connecting platforms such as Facebook Groups and Meetup, is either greatly overwhelming or heavily underwelming.
People encounter two extreme spectrums in their journey to feel connected with others in their local areas and are discouraged as a result.
Knowing this, we took the opportunity to create a social network platform that invites people to feel closely connected through proximity and common shared interests.
RESEARCH
Why are working professionals having a hard time creating friendships?
To understand and empathize, our team conducted a survey over 40 people, leveraging external public research, and I led competitor analysis to create a competitor chart. It was crucial that our findings directed us to uncover key user pain points of working professionals in relation to their journey of making new friends.
1. OPPOSITES DON'T ATTRACT
People are drawn towards those who are more like them. In Barna Study 2018 (n=1025), we see that most people's close friends are mostly similar to themselves in these areas.
2. ONLINE CONVERSATIONS ARE SHALLOW
Due to large social media groups, it has made it difficult to cultivate a genuine connection because people feel overwhelmed by the wide-spread of members in groups they've joined. Overtime, the group topics skew and often no longer have relatable content, thus, leading people to be more reserved and less encouraged to interact.
3. NOT ENOUGH TIME OUTSIDE THE 9-5
Most working professionals are limited to the amount of free time they have outside of work. According to study, the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2018), people need at least 50-200 hours of interaction and communication with another being to become close friends. With that, the study shows you can have co-workers you spend hundreds and hundreds of hours with and still not develop a friendship.
What are people aiming to accomplish in building those friendships?
After uncovering why there were difficulties in making friends, it's important to note what drives our users to create bonds, friendships and relationships. From our survey, we see that people are motivated through these main factors.
1.
2.
3.
Networking for potential opportunities
Talk to people with similar hobbies as them
Exchange knowledge across different interests
COMPETITIVE & COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
What will our users expect and how can Joinn improve that experience?
Our initial insight from research gave us a bigger understanding of what the users' motivations were. Our next steps followed by analyzing our competitors and how they functioned. We gained more insight on how our users might expected Joinn to operate and the main takeaways for what flows and features could be improved on.
USER FLOW
From research to designing the user flow experience
The comparative analysis highlighted how users valued streamlined groups with more opportunities to carry conversations. Using these key insights, we decided to move forward in building out what a user would navigate through on Joinn, focusing the group discover to discussion feature.
DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Frustrations to fruition
Through our research and user flow, it was pivotal to build a platform that made users feel as though they were curating their own feed from interests - leading them to find groups and people that aligned with theirs. This allows users to eliminate precious time wasted on countless searches.
ONBOARDING
Curation
From the start, users are prompted to curate their profile and feed based on personal interests & location.
HOME
Discover
Creating a space where users feel they can find a community and niche of their own.
GROUPS
Connect
Joining a community where endless conversations happen, events are hosted, and authentic friendships are made.
NEXT STEPS
Joinn-ing a community
Measuring Impact
On this launch, we saw clear growth from user engagement rates – increasing our App download rate by 72% and user profile creations by 60%.
What's next?
Based upon our user research, a few future features users would like to see are the ability to direct message a fellow community member and implementing an easier way users can save posts/conversations that they would like to come back to in the future.
