ThirdSpace

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Inspiration

Our main conversation that we had before starting active development was our main source of inspiration, along with the talk by Emily Lin and Michele's extensive prior research and interest on this topic.

What it does

ThirdSpace is a public service that connects people that might have similar interests based on proximity in a way that allows for natural friendships to develop. Users can join auto generated groups that have randomly assigned locations. Users are incentivized to show "proof of life" by going to these locations and posting proof to the message board.

How we built it

Our process began with a roughly 3 hour long conversation. While we had a LOT of ideas, it was lacking a specific direction. That was until we went to Emily Lin's amazing talk and the part about breaking down social barriers with a common goal really resonated with us.

Now that we had a direction, we spent the next few hours at the whiteboards. Our first planning was capturing the essence and philosophy of what we were building. A good thesis and give a beacon or lighthouse to refer too throughout the development of a project. Sitemaps and information architecture was the quickest phase of the project. Projects without passion or direction can fizzle out, as it requires thinking about something that doesn't exist in a very low level way. Luckily due to our prior research, we were able to group elements and create connections between pieces of information, and develop coexisting systems out of them. Finally using our created sitemaps, we sketched low fidelity wire frames. Some of the screens, such as the discover panel took a few iterations to get down, but we are both very proud of the result.

After all of the pre-production, we went to Figma and made core design decisions like font and colors. Then it was just a matter of porting the low fidelity wireframes into an interactive, high fidelity design. We added a checklist to mark what needed to be created, and what we could leave out. Without this, we likely wouldn't have finished on time.

Challenges we ran into

Coming from different majors (XA and Information Science), there was a learning curve when getting to know each other and how we could best use our strengths.
Scope creep is real, and is the biggest risk to time based design challenges like this.
Meeting up with people from the internet has a bad rep for a reason. Developing things like the community trust score and letting the platform moderate itself was a difficult feature to plan for. Adding additional safety features like the filter and profile badges helped alleviate some potential safety concerns.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The map toggle view was a last minute addition originally thought to be out of scope, while its a little visually buggy, the effect really sells the gamification aspect and shows the user the groups and friends they could make,

What we learned

A few very important lessons were learnt during our process. A few highlights are as follows:

Pre-production and proper planning is very important, however you can get caught in an endless loop of adding and adding features, leading to a cramped and overscoped project. For every 3 ideas you put down in pre-production, removing or merging 2 ideas together can be really beneficial to your projects output.
Your backgrounds matter more than you think. This project would not have happened if Michelle and I hadn't been passionate about this subject. This is what can happen when people with similar interests share a goal, much like the app itself.
For all the Figma users, use components. They are extremely helpful at making prototypes and removing clutter and inefficiencies in your workflow.
Test your prototype on the target device (mobile in our case). Our biggest remaining issue is that some text is quite small and this could have been solved if we tested our screens on their intended platform.

What's next for ThirdSpace

A more polished, portfolio version will be created and shared in the coming weeks. Perhaps even a functional version of the app down the road would be a unique project.