PROBLEM STATEMENT
When you go to an event or hangout with friends, you need to know information about the event and about the people going as well.
To help people be more connected with their friends, a mobile application would help by giving information about the event and the people going as well.
Project Goals
- Create an all-in-one way to capture event and meetup details
- Find a product market fit in the event/meetup space
- Easily share event details to people on and off the app
- Be able to view memories of the event or meetup afterward
Without an established user base, I wasn’t able to test with existing users, so I reached out to event planners, people who attend a lot of events, and others to gain insights on their existing flow, motivations, and struggles to shape the app solution.
Research Methods
Customer Interviews
Market Research
Prototype Testing
User Story Mapping
Core User Needs
Sharing event details
When planning a small meetup, people need a better way for sharing plans. Many people use texts and group chats to plan and share hangouts, meetups, and events. This leads to lost information, miscommunication, and slow event planning process.
Managing confirmations
For some events, event planners need to know exactly who is coming and when they are arriving. Sending out e-vites should be a seemless process.
Finding new events
Most people only host events occasionally and go to events mostly based on their friends. People need a way of finding out of new events better than texting everyone.
Better scheduling with others
One of the frustrations of planning an event is confirming plans with people attending. If it is a flexible event, people need a better way of finding a time other than a long chain of texts in a group chat.
Following the user interviews, I looked over all the findings and created a user story map and ideal user persona.
This led to prioritizing certain features that could help overcome road blocks on the user story map.
Creating events
Designing an easy and convient way to enter all event information. Event creation is only dependant on the name and time while the user is free to add more information as needed.
Sharing events
Allowing people to share events to their friends on the app and be notified through push notifications. Currently working on allowing people to share to people outside Locality.
Finding other events
Creating a way for people to see events outside their friend group was essential to a complete user experience. Some areas of browsing include events around you, popular events, and upcoming events. Users can choose to have their event public or private when they create an event.
Technology Stack
iOS App: Swift
I developed this app natively in Swift to learn a new language and deal with technical issues better. Taking a large scale software development course in college helped me manage my codebase and create clean and re-useable code.
Backend: Google Cloud Firebase
After testing Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Firebase, I ended up choosing Firebase for all my backend needs. I use a NoSQL database along with cloud server functions written in JavaScript with Node.js. Using Google Firebase has let me optimize for fast read speeds and scalability.
Mobile Dyanmic Links: React + Node.js
I am currently working on bridging the gap between users sharing events on and off the app by creating responsive mobile webpages to give a preview of the app. I am using react and node.js to build more re-usable components.
Findings
Events are dynamic
As I am getting feedback from more people using Locality in the real world, many events are moving, constantly change, and take multiple people to organize. In future updates, I plan on focusing on capturing these changes on the app to be more competitive.
Simplifing creating an event
To get more people creating events on Locality, I am continuing to focus on making the create event process as easy as possible without losing any features.
Differentiation
While building the first version of Locality, many features from competitors were built to ease adoption. However, I plan on focusing on smaller and more dyanmic events that will require different features than current competitors.