Discovery

Event: Speed Friending

Event to bring people together to learn about each other. We learned that our students are extremely uncomfortable with the association between anonymous dating and making friendships.

Our learnings from the failure of this event lead us to refine our vision towards less socially intense activities. And, we began looking towards matching people for team game activities, or anything that wasn't a direct face to face conversation.

Event: Table Topics

Event to enable people to take a table number, and put it down on their table to make it as a place to talk about some topic. Key takeaway: we learned that it is incredibly important to make something feel like an officially supported and safe event.

This learning pivoted our idea from individuals meeting individuals to small groups meeting small groups.

Prototyping / MVP

The application infrastructure was entirely developed with Elixir/Phoenix, and the front-end HTML hybrid app was built with Angular 2 and TypeScript.

Wednesday at Garst

Following our field research activities, we began the process of defining what a Minimally Viable Product would look like.

This concept was very basic combining a day of the week with a popular campus dining hall made marketing and stickiness of the name easy as both "Wednesday" and "Garst" were reminder (trigger) words.

The concept of Wednesday at Garst is a simple very narrowly scoped attempt to matching students together to meet for lunch and dinner on Wednesday.

We chose to limit the usage to a single day and location to hook into feelings of exclusivity and the fear-of-missing out. These concepts were inspired by the fantastic book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

We spent little time refining a UI, and kept everything as simple as possible for our tests–no accounts, no geo location, just a simple interface with a couple components for helping students coordinate with potential lunch buddies.

When it's not Wednesday

When it's not Wednesday

Simplicity is king when the goal is to learn about your audience

Simplicity is king when the goal is to learn about your audience

The Parrot App Design

The shitty first draft

The first version of the Parrot App came from simply putting a skin around a user experience map.

An early wireframe for Parrot developed by Zach LaMarre for the Parrot team

An early wireframe for Parrot developed by Zach LaMarre for the Parrot team

Bouncing between design and implementation planning ensured that we were not only focused on the organization of our features, but that we were also taking into account the web component architecture that would be needed for our app to meet performance needs.

Whiteboarding out our frontend component layout strategy

Whiteboarding out our frontend component layout strategy