MeetMe

Inspiration

The goal of our app is to create a space where women and non binary individuals of color can find a place to connect with people of a similar demographic with similar interests. As underrepresented communities, we often don’t find comfortable spaces to meet others with similar interests and backgrounds. We chose the name MeetMe to emphasize that we want to encourage these relationships to not only develop on the virtual level, but to extend to in-person meetups that will foster a local community and help users promote their interests, businesses, and hobbies.

What it does

The user can join Groups, and Groups can host events. These events can either be virtual, similar to Clubhouse room or a Discord Voice Channel, or in-person. In the case of the latter, the event will have an associated location, while in the case of the former, the app will provide a place where the users can group voice chat. Each Group can also assign itself and its events Interest tags to explain its general topic. Users can add Interest tags to their profile so the app can better recommend new Groups to them. New Groups can also be recommended by recommending Groups that users with similar Interests are in.

How we built it

We focused on designing our app in Figma. We used Figma Mirror to validate our designs on a real phone screen and ensure optimal usability.

Challenges we ran into

We had to consider how to make our design both aesthetically pleasing, as well as intuitive, easy to use, and accessible. We also had to look into gender neutral and pleasing color schemes to take into account what times people use the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we managed to achieve our original goals of aesthetically pleasing, while also being able to include accessibility features and a COVID disclaimer.

What we learned

We got a lot of experience with using Figma collaboratively and designing UI/UX.

What's next for MeetMe

Next steps would be to transition this to a functioning app. For iOS, we would use Swift and Android we would use Kotlin. Once this is transitioned to a functioning app, we would also want to add integration with other apps. This can include calendar apps like Google Calendar to sync events, or social media apps to enable easy sharing and discovering of friends and Groups.