Combating Urban Loneliness

In this case study, I will share my journey in designing a mobile app for activity-driven social meetups to find "friends for a day". I worked with two friends on this project, where one is also a designer and the other is a iOS engineer. Our focus throughout the design process was to craft a user-friendly interface that would help people connect with like-minded people through activities and combat urban loneliness.

Client

Hei App (Self-initiated project)

Year

2024

Role

PM, Product Design

Problem

Users' Pain Points & Market Research

The project began with an in-depth analysis of the current market for solutions that help users find other people to do a specific activity. We included our own experiences using these solutions. A lot of social (networking) apps focus on either larger group events where a verified host or moderater publishes the event, or romantic relationships where search is profile-driven and highlights the person, not the activity.

Seeing the Opportunity

After looking at competitor solutions, we thought about what we could do differently to set us apart. We saw the opportunity in creating a solution where people can focus on finding casual connections based on shared interests and things in common and create an activity-driven app, where everyone, not only hosts, can create an event based on the their current location.

Discover

Benchmarking

We looked at six different competitors to validate our hypothesis and benchmark the market for our solution.

Meetup: Lacks casual connections and meetup requests by individuals rather than hosts/organisers, expensive to host events that’s why only larger organisations do it
Eventbrite: Lacks peer to peer activities (smallest group is ≤25 people)
Bumble BFF: Lack of activity driven and casual connections
Heylo: No option to search for a specific activity only by location and related groups that I’m already part of, no exact-location search, no spontaneous casual groups as it’s always larger communities that are well organised and have fixed hosts/location/time
Hinge: Lack of connection besides romantic-relationship, lack of casual friends hangout explored from activity proposals
Happn: Lack of geo-based activity explorations, lack of connection besides romantic-relationship

Understanding Use Cases

We mapped our targeted user cases across three intent levels: (1) explicit (knowing exactly what they want), (2) semi-defined (having a rough idea), and (3) exploratory (open to discovery). By comparing platforms like Spotify and Netflix, we applied this framework to Hei App’s user flows for both consumers (toC) and businesses (toB):

Consumers (toC): From finding a hiking partner (direct intent) to casually browsing for social connections (exploratory intent).
Businesses (toB): From promoting specific events to discovering ways to increase engagement.

This structured approach helped validate Hei App’s value proposition, ensuring it caters to both goal-oriented and discovery-driven users.

Iterate

Structuring Features

The table below defines the feature structure for Hei App, categorizing user-generated content (UGC), location data, and profile attributes based on priority and function.

High-priority (P0) features: User-generated plans, interests, and live locations drive event discovery and spontaneous connections.
Mid-priority (P1) features Group events and neighborhood-based exploration help users find relevant people and activities nearby.
Lower-priority (P2/P3) features: Organization and country-based attributes expand long-term connections beyond local interactions.

By structuring these attributes, we created a scalable system that aligns with user intent—from planned activities to casual exploration—strengthening Hei App’s core social and event-driven experience.

Moodboard & Branding

For our branding we explored different options, and found inspiration in saturated pop colors, and the use of emojis making our brand feel fun and accessible.