Sparking Connections with LuminUs
Designing an app to help friends stay in touch, no matter the distance.
Role
Research Insights,
Ideation,
Final UI Lead
tools
Figma, Canva
YEAR
2024
Project Overview
Friendship is a warm fire.
Your twenties are a decade of change, but with career pressures, big moves to new cities, and the constant navigation of evolving romantic relationships, keeping the fire of close friendships alive can become a challenge.
Completed as part of a Master's-level Fundamentals of UX course, this group project seeks to find a way to help young adults stoke the flames of meaningful connection, keeping them strong despite the challenges of this transformative decade.
Driven by the fire metaphor, we iterated upon multiple solutions to address this deep-rooted need of staying connected.
My role included critically analyzing our research findings around the nuances of digital interactions, facilitating the prioritization of key features, and driving major design decisions in the final interface to create a high-fidelity prototype of LuminUs.
The Problem
It’s hard to keep the fire burning while navigating major life changes.
Young adults need a meaningful way to continuously feed the fire of their closest friendships as they navigate major life changes.
How might we support and fuel these connections despite distance and busy schedules?
The Solution
A platform to spark connections through photos and music.
Introducing LuminUs: an app that turns simple, everyday moments into sparks of connection.
My role included:
Conducting secondary research on key features that make a technological solution successful
Interviewing 2 participants
Analyzing the consolidated research insights for patterns in digital behaviour among participants
Leading the ideation phase with brainstorming workshops
Finalizing the UI and final deliverables
Process
The iterative design process lit our way.
Here’s a quick overview of our end-to-end process:
Problem Definition
Current social media apps are cold with engagement.
Competitive Analysis
There are many social networking platforms currently available, but do they meet the needs of our target audience? We researched our most prominent competitors: BeReal, Locket, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Based on this analysis, we found an opportunity to provide users with more fulfilling methods to stay connected with friends by prioritizing authenticity and thoughtful engagement.
User Interviews
We interviewed eight young adults to kindle insights into their views on friendships.
More specifically, we wanted to learn what people find fulfilling in friendships and how their digital habit help or hinder their connections.
We narrowed our target audience to young adults in their twenties who have experienced a life event in the past two years that have significantly impacted their ability to connect with friends.
Objectives for 1:1 interviews:
Understand key pain points participants face in maintaining friendships
Learn about the types of interactions participants find most fulfilling
Identify sentiments around the reaching out process
Learn about the apps participants currently use to stay in touch with friends
Findings & Analysis
People desired authentic updates but struggled to ignite conversations.
Affinity Map
With each major finding on a sticky note, we grouped the insights by similarity and topic. I led the analysis around the nuances of digital interactions. The following themes emerged:
All participants prefer staying updated with a small, intimate group of close friends rather than large social circles. They value quality interactions over quantity.
Multiple participants are seeking more authentic, unfiltered ways to see what’s happening in their friends’ lives. They prefer updates that feel real, rather than curated content.
Many participants expressed hesitations in starting conversations or reaching out to friends because they’re worried about bothering them.
Through these key insights, we determined that our solution needed to do the following:
Prioritize small-group dynamics
Encourage spontaneous and genuine sharing of content
Facilitate easy conversation starters, reducing the anxiety of initiating interactions
User Persona
Meet Gina.
Now that we had a better understanding of the problem, the next step was to synthesize insights from the user interviews into a user persona.
Meet Gina: a young professional navigating a new job in a new city, while trying to hold onto the friendships that matter most.
Ideation
We needed to fuel connections that were easy to spark and intentionally sustained.
From the beginning, we knew we wanted to develop a concept that resonated deeply with the emotional essence of close friendships.
To kick off the ideation phase, we used the Crazy Eights method, a rapid brainstorming technique where each team member sketched eight ideas in eight minutes. This method encouraged quick, creative thinking and helped us generate a wide range of concepts—ranging from practical solutions to bold, imaginative ideas—each aimed at fostering meaningful connections.
As the studio lead for this phase of the project, I facilitated the prioritization of features for our solution based on user insights, feasibility, and alignment with our project goals. In the end, these were the standout concepts:
While seemingly non-related, these ideas all highlight a common theme of enabling easy but intentional connections between friends, creating a tangible sense of presence even when far apart.
Sketches & Wireframes
Initially, we set out with a goal to fuel the essence of a physical neighbourhood.
The neighbourhood concept resonated deeply with our team, so we set out with ambitious goals to re-create the essence of a physical neighbourhood in a digital environment where users who lived far apart could still feel as if their friends were right next door.
Through this platform, Gina can:
Livestream to her close friends from Toronto when she feels lonely
View the livestreams of all her friends at once, creating a sense of togetherness
Talk one-on-one with a friend when desired
I created sketches and low-fidelity wireframes for this idea:
I created sketches and low-fidelity wireframes for this idea:
Usability Testing
We needed a solution that would ignite comfort.
Unfortunately, after conducting usability testing and receiving expert feedback, we discovered that some key issues and gaps existed. Most notably:
Multiple users expressed discomfort with the idea of livestreaming/being on camera
There was no direct solution to address the issue of hesitations in initiating conversations
The interface was confusing to first-time users
Desktop apps are less frequently used than mobile
We saw that a shift in our solution was necessary, but we were determined to preserve the heart of the neighbourhood and its sense of community through a digital experience.
Through the feedback, we now knew that our solution needed to do the following:
Incorporate a form of content that is comfortable and accessible for the average user
Make reaching out feel effortless and low-pressure, with a feature aimed to support this pain point
Utilize icons for common, familiar functions while text is incorporated to enhance clarity
Shift to a mobile format to maximize utility for users
The Creative Process
We unintentionally sparked a design probe.
With time running out, we decided to take on a unconventional approach to solutioning. We allowed our desired user interface to guide and inspire the ideation process, ensuring our concept aligned with key metaphors.
Through this process, our mood board took shape:
For our UI, we aimed to capture the feeling of sitting by a campfire under a night sky full of stars surrounded by your closest friends, embraced by the warmth by both the fire and presence of loved ones.
After (multiple) more rounds of brainstorming, prototyping, and feedback gathering, the concept of LuminUs arose. I worked closely with Chen to design and iterate upon our high-fidelity prototype.
The Final Result
LuminUs helps Gina keep the flames of her friendships thriving with small, meaningful gestures.
As the studio lead for the finalization of the UI and presentation of our solution, I ensured that each screen of our prototype reflected key user needs and integrated feedback while implementing final touches on the visual details and micro-interactions which would enhance user experience.
Reflection
Fuel solutions by deeply understanding the problem and target audience.
I learned several lessons throughout this process. My key takeaways were the following:
The Importance of Iteration and Pivoting: While we initially had a vision for the app, real user feedback and testing revealed opportunities to improve. I learned that pivoting—whether tweaking features, refining interactions, or even adjusting our solution completely—was necessary to create a more user-centered product.
The Power of a Strong Design Vision and Metaphor: Our use of fire metaphors helped give the app emotional resonance and a consistent narrative while tying together the visual language, user interactions, and the core experience of staying connected. I learned that a strong conceptual framework not only guides design decisions but also helps users intuitively understand the app’s purpose and functionality.
If I were to start this project again, I would place more emphasis on the problem definition and refinement phase. Narrowing the focus to a specific target audience with clear needs would have led to a more streamlined solution, reducing the need for additional refinement later and reinforcing the importance of a focused problem definition in guiding the design process.
