Problem Statement
Our team’s goal is to help seniors strengthen their social connections and form more meaningful connections. Graduating seniors are at a transitional stage in life—soon friends they see around campus may no longer be in their geographical area. Maintaining friendships can be difficult, but the difficulty only increases with distance. By ensuring seniors have strong social connections, they are more likely to stay in touch with friends after graduating.
Baseline Study
Our baseline study consisted of several steps: screening, pre-interviews, daily diary (baseline study), post-interview, and data synthesis:
Given our problem space, we wanted to recruit graduating seniors who wanted to strengthen their social connections. We used this screener to find individuals who met this criteria. After we selected 7 participants for our user study, we conducted pre-interviews to learn more about participants’ personalities and social habits. In particular, we explored participants’ goals for their social life—what they want/need when it comes to social interaction, whether their wants/needs are being met, and what they would want to change about their social life.
For the baseline study, we asked participants to fill out this Google Form everyday over the course of 5 days. We asked specific questions about their daily interactions with people including types of events attended, hours spent socializing, and the distribution of interactions with new people vs interactions with strangers. After completing the Baseline Study, a post-interview was conducted with every participant. Post-interviews were more specific to the participants and their individual experiences. It consisted of questions regarding trends in their daily diaries as well as reflections they had on the experience.
We began synthesizing data by utilizing various techniques such as fragmenting data, grouping key insights and mapping findings.
Responses fall into: scenarios, motivations, habits, difficulties, and feelings. Key Insights are:
- Users prefer to socialize in relaxing environments like dining halls
- Motivated by the desire to talk to interesting people and make good use of spare time
- But some feel nervous and hesitant; Others are too busy to meet up spontaneously
- The two above types formed the basis of our personas, and we realize that our design should help reduce social pressure and expedite scheduling simultaneously
Comparative Research Analysis
Through our comparative research analysis, we wanted to determine how current apps on the market enable meaningful connections both through existing friendship and strangers. We examined 10 apps and divided them into 4 categories based on how low-commitment vs high-commitment and whether they focus on existing friendships or new connections. Because of the specific customer niches, users need to use these apps separately to achieve their goals and there’s not a one size fits all solution for meeting people.
- Apps focusing on introducing new people usually tend to have a bigger audience base and expose users to many people.
- In this segment, we also see a contrarian rise of apps offering highly curated matches based on personal data to cut through the noise of meeting many people.
- Apps focused on enhancing existing relationships are divided into 2 categories:
- 1) Tools for making staying in touch easier such as helping with reaching out
- 2) Suggest activities to keep the participants entertained and learning about each other
On the downside, we see the broader range of an audience the user has to select from, the relationships tend to be shallower while for the apps that help with developing deeper relationships: these avoid overwhelming the user by limiting the number of exposed users, and apps focused on curation face the challenge of a high opportunity cost if the curated match doesn’t work out.
Our goal is to borrow from the strength of each category to distinguish ourselves. For example, we allow users to curate themselves while also encouraging them to reach out to a bigger audience base of weak ties and nudge them to engage in meaningful conversation and activities to strengthen the connection.
Literature Review
We conducted a literature review in which we found 10 articles with relevant research regarding this problem domain. Through this process we gained the following insights:
- Time spent together strengthens friendships: The insight from Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis and “bond belong” theory suggests that as people spend more hours together, it increases closeness among them. Similarly, a study by Daniel J. Canary shows that when users spend more time together they reach a feeling of assurance which promotes self-disclosure and relationship talks that can even further strengthen the friendship. That’s why we nudge our participants into meeting and interacting with each other to give momentum to a connection for further deepening.
- Geographically close vs long distance friendships: One of the studies discussed how friends living in geopolitical proximity tend to have closer friendships while long-distance friendships were typically of longer duration. Since there are pros and cons to both mediums of meeting, we decided our product should help both groups by nudging the friends within physical proximity to meet in person while motivating the long-distance friends to still keep in touch virtually.
- Barriers to long-distance friendship: Especially for long-distance friendships, a paper by Huq, Md. Azizul suggests how time zones and time management is the biggest hurdle in maintaining a long-distance friendship. Our app can be of big help to the users by offering calendar integration and streamlining finding availability.
Personas and Journey Maps
We worked on several personas and journey maps to garner customer insights.
Persona: Somewhat Awkward Sam
Persona: Time-Constrained TaylorKey Insights
We found that both personas want to intentionally or spontaneously reconnect with people before undergrad ends. But the most difficult moment in each persona’s respective journey was different.
- Time-Constrained Taylor dreads planning the social interaction. They’re excited to meet, but more so frustrated by the back-and-forth logistics texting to actually schedule a time.
- Socially Awkward Sam suffers during the social interaction. Overwhelmed and uncertain, they have multiple thoughts at once, unable to enjoy that moment of human connection.
Intervention/Product Ideation
We considered 3 intervention study ideas, choosing our final intervention idea based on testability, as well as our syntheses and behavior change science.
- Send nudges at meal times to get food with friends. Allow people to indicate whether they ate alone. Send daily/weekly statistics to encourage them.
- Pros: This idea can be extended to other activities
- Cons: People’s schedules can be unpredictable, so it would be hard to know when to send our nudge. Also, people don’t always want to eat with others
- Send nudges throughout the day, urging the participant to strike up conversations with the strangers around them at the moment
- Pros: Helps people feel more comfortable talking to strangers
- Cons: Intrusive and uncomfortable. Random reminders don’t have anchors – and thus unlikely to lead to habits.
- Ask participants to text 1 friend before bed. Participants should ask to meet and send their complete availability the next week
- Pros: Caters to all types of personas we explored, encourages users to engage in social interaction and facilitates scheduling.
- Cons: People might be hesitant to share their calendar
Ultimately, we decided on idea 3. It generalizes idea 1 to allow for any activity of participants’ choice, and is rooted to a based anchor – before going to bed, send off a text.
Intervention Study and Synthesis
Similar to our baseline study, our intervention study consisted of several steps: screening, pre-interviews, daily diary, post-interview, and data synthesis. Our goal is to let people initiate contact in a low-stress setting efficiently. We recruited 5 participants who are graduating within a year. This includes senior, master, and PhD, and one participant is from baseline study.
Regarding the protocol of this study, we asked participants to, everyday before bed, text their availability over the next week to a friend they want to catch up with. We also texted them a reminder each night (to mimic app notification) with an optional reachout template. They fill out a questionnaire the day after, answering who they contacted, what they did together, and whether our intervention helped.
We had several hypotheses for this study including:
- Publicizing one’s schedule among friends is a lighthearted expression of interest to connect for the socially awkward
- Busy people will value the convenience of accessing friends’ availability within seconds.
- Templates further decrease the effort required to reach out.
Synthesizing and analyzing the raw data of our study resulted in the following insights:
- Pros:
- Participants actually reconnect with old friends. Their friends are surprised but excited to catch up.
- Opening conversations use standardized language like “It’s been a while… I wonder if you’re interested in…” lending itself to the use of templates.
- They schedule meals or study sessions, which are things they always do, except now it’s with an old friend.
- Cons:
- Late reply or no reply happens, but participants are not discouraged. They’ll try someone else.
- Participants’ schedules might not work for the friend, and they’ll have to go through painful discussions. This suggests that our app should have a recommendation feature that only pairs up people with shared availability.
We utilized a fishbone diagram to further illustrate insights:
The more participants attend events, the more people they bump into, forming a benevolent cycle. Plans they made with old friends smoothly integrate into their day, socially fulfilling both parties.
Storyboard & Stories:
From our research, we’ve identified x2 main challenges in getting to know fellow senior classmates better:
- Busy schedule, hard to find time to meet up with friends
- Social awkwardness
So we made the personas below…
| Persona 1: The Busy Buddy | Persona 2: Socially Awkward Sam |
| Want: Get to know their classmates better | Want: Also to get to know their classmates better |
| Challenge: Schedule extremely busy, hard to meet up with people. | Challenge: They find social interactions difficult to initiate and sustain. |
Current Direction
Given the success of our intervention study, we want to continue down a path where we facilitate easy scheduling in order to help individuals strengthen social connections. In particular, we want a final app to address the main challenges we found through our participant studies and data synthesis:
- Allow users to sync their current calendar for convenience
- Keep a friend list (and even searching through number) for users to check on others
- Scheduling Solution: Find shared free time in user’s and their friends’ calendars to suggest meetup opportunities
- Social awkwardness: Offer templates of text messages or prompts and help initiate the social bonding
We intend to explore several mechanisms to meet these goals ranging from notifications to daily digests to chat features. We’re excited to see how future data collection and insights gathered shape the future of our app!
