Overview

Coming out of the pandemic, my team wanted to create an app that would facilitate in-person connection, authenticity, and shared physical spaces. dindin is a mobile app that helps people find shared time to hang out with their friends.

To develop dindin, we conducted a generative research study on the social interactions of college students, built iterative versions of the app, launched it on TestFlight, and ran a 10-day mixed-methods field study.

Generative Research

After a literature and competitive review, we wanted to learn more about how we could encourage collocated social interaction amongst college students and recent graduates. Specifically, we wanted to know:

Diary Study

We conducted a three-day diary study with 8 diverse participants in order to answer this question. We asked participants to text us whenever they left the house, met a new person, or had a fun interaction. In follow-up interviews, we dove deeper into their diary study entries and how they feel about meeting new people.

Our synthesis led to the following themes:

• Busy students prioritize spending time with existing friends because they have already dedicated time to those relationships and can see them progressing further.
  
• College students have varying schedules, so it can be difficult to find shared time with friends — especially when coordinating with multiple people.
• People react positively when other people initiate, but don’t want to “waste” their energy initiating if it won’t be reciprocated.

Paper Prototypes

Based on our research, we decided to make an app that would facilitate meetups between existing friends. I was responsible for defining the app’s layout and user flows. I sketched out initial wireframes, made 4 iterative paper prototypes, and tested them with 6 people.

Final Design

We built an MVP of dindin in 2 weeks using React Native and Javascript, then we launched it on TestFlight. I was responsible for the visual design. In order to get the MVP out quickly, we used Bootstrap components and I designed the front-end directly in the codebase.

Calendar Page

Finding shared availability is what differentiates dindin from other messaging apps. The calendar page shows a filtered version of all the times a group is free.

Based on our user research and some personal judgement calls, it only includes times that are:

• At least 1 hour longShorter hangouts are not worth the travel time, especially on a large college campus.
  
• Between 9am and 11pmHangouts should happen during reasonable waking hours.
  
• In the next 2 daysStudent schedules fill up last-minute with meetings and assignments. They prefer scheduling in-the-moment, when they know they have time to spare.

Example Flow

Let's say you wanted to schedule a hangout with the group Cool Peeps!

• Click on the group
  
• View the times when everyone will be free
  
• Message the group with a propose time

Field Study

We ran a field study over the course of 10 days in order to understand:

Quantitative Analysis

We launched the app on TestFlight, tracked feature usage and user retention with Google Analytics, and then followed the natural flow of how people would use the app.

We lost most users at the beginning of the funnel.

• People had trouble getting their friends to join the app, so they did not have people to make plans with.
  
• We launched dindin at the end of the school year, which meant that students were especially busy and hesitant to download a new social app.
  

We also saw a rapid decline in usage over the course of our study.

• Our users had few friends on the app to begin with, and their calendar availabilities were not always indicative of their actual availability. Users lost faith in the scheduling functionality of dindin.
  

Qualitative Analysis

We also recruited 5 users for a 10-day diary study. They logged their experiences with dindin each day in a google form and then participated in follow-up interviews. I designed the diary study and led the qualitative analysis.

Moving Forward

Here are the ways that I would improve dindin:

• Make finding shared availability more visible and accessible.The calendar function is what differentiates dindin from messaging apps, and it was popular among the people who found it. From the 4 users that pressed the calendar button, there were 17 total PressCalendar events.
  
• Further reduce activation energy to schedule meetups. Clicking on a time slot should suggest it within the group chat and then give friends an easy call to action with yes/no RSVP buttons. Suggest meeting times to reduce inertia.
  
• Encourage more accurate availability or rethink availability. Users should be able to manually block off times within the app in order to reflect personal preferences. Alternatively, we could have users state when they are free for social interactions instead uploading their calendar availability.
• Implement an intentional growth strategy. In order for dindin to be useful, it requires users to have a strong network/group of friends who are on the app.

Reflection

I learned a lot from developing dindin: getting to launch an app on TestFlight, track usage data, and run multiple diary studies — all in 10 weeks.

The app definitely didn't perform as well as I had hoped. In the future, I'll pay extra attention to timing and marketing when launching a social media app.

I also think we lost sight of dindin's value proposition while rushing to launch. We knew from our research that people would primarily use dindin for group scheduling, but the calendar functionality ended up hidden in a corner. In the future, I will pause and make sure research recommendations don't get lost in the final design.