UX/UI Case Study: MeetUp
Team project | 2-week | A new feature for an existing mobile app | Concept
Our team of four worked on integrating a new feature for the existing meeting platform that would help to convert passive users into active users. As a group, we generated lots of ideas and evaluated them through different workshops sessions. In a pair, I created a research plan, conducted five interviews, analysed findings from the interviews and synthesised insights. I developed the mid-fi wireframes. I co-developed the hi-fi prototype in Figma and set up usability tests with the testing platform Maze.
The brief
Meetup is a popular service used to organise online groups that host in-person and virtual events. Users use Meetup to find friends, share a hobby, or do professional networking.
Our goal was to create a new function for the mobile app which encourages users to attend events. The new feature should help passive users to get over their fears and anxieties about meeting new people.
How Meetup works
Any Meetup user can be an organiser. Organisers can set up groups and arrange cyclical events. As a regular member, you simply:
- Sign up and create a simple user profile
- Sign up to groups you are interested in
- Search for an event
- Confirm attendance
- In an ideal scenario, attend the event and fulfil your needs and goals!
What is important to point out, Meetup is not a typical social media platform — users do not have “followers” or other connections. You can only send messages to other group members and organisers.
Existing Meetup Interface
Process
Our planning encompassed exploring the issue with the Double Diamond framework, whereby we would converge and diverge our thinking through four phases — Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.
Discover
User Interviews
We started the discovery phase by drafting a research plan and fleshing out a discussion guide to understand what information we wanted to gather from our interviewees. We followed that with five remote interviews that we transcribed to ensure the collected data was adequately recorded and easy to process.
We organised all quotes and observations into groups and categories. In this way, we were able to identify trends from the interviews. Our key findings were:
- Interviewees suggested that a buddy system to talk before the event would make them feel more at ease.
- Interviewees find that knowing who else is a first-timer makes the event less nerve-wracking.
- Interviewees suggested that conversational tips and prompts would help them to alleviate the initial awkward introductions and conversations.
Competitive and Comparative analysis
In parallel to interviews, the other part of the team researched the market. They conducted a competitive feature analysis of event platforms, comparing Meetup with three other event platforms — TicketSwap, Eventbrite and Locals Org. As these direct competitors provide similar services, we only discovered that they provide similar features.
Comparative analysis of indirect competitors proved to be much more helpful for this project. It helped us understand how other platforms help users deal with issues similar to Meetup users, such as social anxiety and fear of meeting new people. We focused our analysis on platforms that work in communication, community and mental health.
The analysed platforms:
- Create paths of communication and introductions to others in the same group, helping to form relationships and reduce feelings of isolation.
- Provide mental health assistance, through real-life support or articles.
- Create community guidelines that indicate the core values of the platform, which include inclusivity, respect, friendship and responsibility.
- Create tools and features which help and support our user’s general wellbeing, which can take the form of articles, podcasts or videos, to help alleviate our user’s main fears.
Define
Persona and User Journey
To summarise everything we had learned about our target users, we created a persona of Morgan — an ambitious and success-driven entrepreneur who has the intention to network but has anxieties regarding meeting new people.
Subsequently, we complied Morgan’s actions into a timeline to create a journey map. This exercise helped us capture users’ pain points and frustrations while helping us build a conversation within the team.
Problem-framing workshop
To create a solid starting point for structuring our further work, we captured the problem to solve in the form of the following problem statement:
Morgan needs a way to overcome his concerns and social anxieties so that he can benefit from helpful events that suit his needs and interests.
The team also came together to agree How Might We questions that reframed the problem for ideation. The statement we felt most succinctly captured our user’s feelings was an amalgamation of several ideas:
How might we create a function that helps alleviate Morgan’s fears and anxieties when meeting people for the first time?
Develop
Design Studio
We began the next phase by running a UX workshop — the Design Studio, during which we divergent and convergent our thinking. In the first round, we used the Crazy 8s technique to help individuals generate ideas that we later shared, voted for and discussed.
In the second round, each team member worked individually to sketch one big idea — we could build on a previous idea or combine elements of several ideas from the previous round.
The concepts we generated were:
- Messaging feature for newbies
- Function randomly matching newbies
- Videos with tips on how the event works and how to meet people
- Conversation starters/icebreakers
Finally, we could draft a storyboard of the critical steps related to our agreed idea.
Mid-fi prototype
The challenge of the project was to incorporate our ideas into the existing app seemingly. We started with wireframing keyframes, which allowed us to understand the current user flow and the original Design System (the type system and the UI elements).
Subsequently, we added frames for our feature to closely match Meetup’s general aesthetics and current functionalities, including drafting a Newbie (bee) icon matching the existing set.
Testing
Embracing the iterative approach of Agile methodology, we wanted to discover issues in our design as early as possible to implement changes quickly and minimise the overall risk for the project; therefore, we tested our Mid-Fi prototype with Maze’s remote testing platform.
Although 100% of testers completed all tasks with the expected paths and highly rated the overall experience, the heatmaps revealed problems. Some users had a high rate of misclick for the home screen when we asked them to join the Newbies Community and again when we asked them to find information on the Newbies community.
Task 2 Please sign up for a Networking Event in London from the list. Task 3 Please find information on the Newbies community.
Testing informed our high fidelity prototype, to which we added prompts about the new feature, improved UX writing and extended onboarding screen.
Deliver
The project deliverable was a high-fidelity prototype that shows Morgan’s happy path exploring the new feature.
Morgan opens the Newbie hub, sings up, and continues exploring events that interest him. When he signups to one that caught his attention, he gets connected by the system with another Newbie. He receives a new message that helps him start a conversation with Henry, who quickly replies to Morgan’s friendly message — now they can chat and attend the event together!
Next steps
- The most crucial next step would be to test our prototype to learn how our designs perform with users.
- Create a plan for how to develop quality content for the Newbie hub.
- Pursue the non-digital elements of the Newbie experience that came into view during the ideation session (bands/badges to identify your Newbie status at events).
Key learnings
- I learned the value of the Desing Studio and other workshops in practice. It proved to be a very positive experience for the team that resulted in a lot of value for the project.
- I practice working with a well-established design system to build a new experience within an existing product.
