Yeppi

Figbuild 2026 Prompt
Our Topic: Sense of Belonging
Introducing Yeppi
User Scenario
User Flow
Prototype Screens

The idea for Yeppi came from observing how many international students struggle with loneliness when living in a new country. Moving abroad can be exciting, but it also creates challenges when people cannot easily find others who share their cultural background or experiences. This inspired us to design a solution that helps people discover communities and build a sense of belonging in unfamiliar environments.

Through this project, we learned how important social connection is for mental well-being, especially for people living far from home. We also learned how UX design can transform invisible emotional experiences, such as loneliness or belonging, into measurable insights through thoughtful features like surveys, activity tracking, and community discovery.

We designed Yeppi as a speculative mobile app focused on detecting opportunities for belonging. The app includes features such as a Radar that detects nearby cultural activities, a Connect page where users can discover or create meetups, and a Find People feature that helps users meet others with similar cultural background or interests. We also included a belonging score and a monthly/weekly survey to help users reflect on their social connections over time.

One of the main challenges was designing a way to represent something as intangible as a sense of belonging. Since belonging cannot be directly measured, we explored ways to approximate it through user activity, social engagement, and survey responses. Balancing meaningful insights with a simple and intuitive user experience was another important design challenge.

We are proud that Yeppi transforms the invisible feeling of belonging into something users can detect and understand. By combining features like Radar, community meetups, and belonging insights, we designed an app that helps international students discover cultural connections and build meaningful relationships in a new environment.

Through this project, we learned how powerful community-driven design can be for improving people’s emotional well-being. We also learned how UX design can help visualize intangible experiences like loneliness and belonging through features such as surveys, activity tracking, and social discovery.

In the future, we aim to improve Yeppi by incorporating more sophisticated community recommendations and expanding cultural matching features. We also want to explore ways to better measure belonging through more personalized insights and real-world engagement data.