Fam

Role: Lead UX Engineer
Team: 4 UX Designers, 3 Engineers
Time Constraints: 4 Day Sprint

WINNER OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY WINTER 2022 HACKATHON

Fam is an app for connecting people who wish to host others in their home or join in on someone else's festivities during special times of year.

Inspired by the prompt “Giving Back”, our team focused on giving back around the holiday season. For most, the holidays are spent with family. However, a lot of people aren’t afforded the luxury of having a warm and loving environment. One group in particular really stood out to us where this misfortune is most apparent: the LGBTQ+ community.

Problem Statement: People lacking community or family support around the holidays need a safe and collaborative space to provide them access to a loving and welcoming environment.

We developed our user persona Ray in order to better understand the needs and motivations of our target audience. A proud member of the community who is new to his city but struggles with mental health around the holidays.

Competitive Analysis: We did some research to really understand what kind of impact the holiday season has on the LGBTQ+ community. You might be familiar with a headline “how to survive the holidays with your in-laws” or other playful topics. But it is much more literal for those in this community. With this in mind we knew the direction that we wanted to take.

We looked at 3 companies in which we felt offered users a similar platform to what we wanted to build. We liked bumble’s onboarding process. It’s straightforward with a friendly and respectful tone - which we felt was important for users entering the app for the first time. OneTable has a great user flow for connecting Host’s with guests on the app. And finally Airbnb for their visually appealing and intuitive UI.

User Flow: Our users will open the app and sign up with either email or connecting a third party account. Select whether they will be a host user or attendee user and then personalize their profile. After that they will agree to the terms of service before entering into the homepage.

On the home page the attendee can search for specific events. Once they come across an event of interest - they can send a seat request along with a message explaining their interest to the host in order to break the ice. If it is a mutual match - The host will approve the request and all of the event details will become available. The event will be added to an in-app calendar and the attendee will be placed into a group chat with the host and other attendees in order to further coordinate plans. 

Wireframes and Final Prototype: With the flow in order - we began building out from low-fi to high-fi frames and sharing our thoughts with the development team. Going back and forth making sure what we had in mind for the design was practical. We conducted a usability test just to be sure the navigation was intuitive and there weren’t any major issues that we were overlooking. That test went smoothly and the UX team could finally hand the high-fidelity mockups over to the development team to be built. See below for screenshots of the finished mobile prototype, coded in React Native. Click HERE to watch a walkthrough.

Going Forward: Given the time constraints, there are still a few aspects of our design that we would like to include in future development. Additional security features and ID verification, prompting to enable location services during onboarding, and a further built out filter system for users search for events. We’d also like to build out the Host workflow and design as the intention of this app is to offer people an option to either host or join in on a celebration.