Happening

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  Sketch wireframes

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  User Persona 1

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  User Persona 2

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  User Persona 3

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  brand identity

What is the problem your solution addresses?

The user problem we are looking to solve is the inability to find local events and make connections with your community. Event organizers suffer a similar problem of not knowing how to connect to people outside their own social network to promote their activity.

Why does this occur? When people are in a new area, it is difficult to find friend groups and activities to join. Always being out of the loop on where like-minded individuals are spending time can lead to social isolation and impacts mental health.

Why did you pick this solution, and how does it address the problem?

Our app is a platform for posting casual, local events that a person can look for. These events would be able to be posted by anyone. Ex: a local bookstore having a game night, a church hosting a potluck, a quick game of soccer at the park.

How does this address the problem? The app provides users an avenue to seek out new connections in familiar settings. They may new to a city and are looking for a way new board game fans through a game night at a coffee shop, they may have lived in an area for a long time and haven’t been able to connect with different groups of their community before, or they are just looking for something new to try on the weekend. This app benefits organizers by allowing them to expand their reach from their own social network, to the entire local userbase of the app.

What did our research tell us?

Research indicated that people were actively looking for ways to get more involved with their communities, but they had difficulty finding a platform that is primarily about finding local events. The platforms they are currently using are difficult to navigate, and they require “a lot of effort to actually figure out the event details”. Especially for those who moved to new locations, finding and getting involved with their new community was a struggle, even though they had an active interest in attending events and meeting new people. This informs us that there is a need for a simple platform designed for those with all levels of technology knowledge so that they have easy access to get more involved with their community through events.

What it does

Happening allows users to search and explore events around them, including impromptu ones, and post their own activities. There are many ways to filter events they may be interested in, or simply search for an activity. It also gives users the opportunity to reach out to people before and after events occur and easily manage their own events, both ones they are hosting and upcoming ones they plan to attend.

How we built it

Brainstormed and defined our problem Chose a viable solution that could solve the problem and be built through a mobile application Considered user types and created user personas for who would use the app Researched current solutions and interviewed people about their experiences with the topic Created a user flow for the app Built wireframes and designed brand identity Developed prototypes in Figma

Challenges we ran into

We were challenged with determining what potential features would be the most beneficial for our users, and which were not necessary for the final design. We also found difficulty earlier in the design process with researching our user base and gathering enough data to make an accurate representation of their needs.

What we learned

We gained a lot of experience and understanding of the design process while working as a team. One of the biggest things we learned was how to use Figma more efficiently as a collaborative platform and more about UX principles, such as accessibility and ways to make a design more accessible.

What's next for Happening

For Happening, we would do useability testing and return to our research to better understand how we can make the app better. We would look at factors such as accessibility, whether or not it was an enjoyable user experience, and what ways users can further benefit from the app.

Built With

• figma
• paper
• photoshop