MAP MY FUN

Social nightlife mobile app for tracking your night, friends, and deals

MY ROLE

Competitive Analysis, User Research, Information Architecture, Wireframes, Prototype, Usability Testing, Presentation

The Client

Map My Fun is an early stage startup that is pre-development, looking to validate their idea and further research the needs of those who enjoy their nights out.

GETTING STARTED

This project in particular was heavy on the validation side which meant I had to do a lot of research on whether or not anyone would actually use this. My partner on the project and I created a few surveys and interviewed a number of people and ended up receiving a ton of data on nightlife habits. The hard part after that was making sense of all of that data and pinpointing the frustrations we could address within our scope.

RESEARCH

Naturally, we had been researching what if any types of social features would people use in an app like ours. This was originally conceived as a feature where you would share the events of previous nights, but we found out people were not so interested in doing that. One of our bigger findings though was that people have a hard time getting friends together to go out and we realized the biggest social aspect of our app would be as a way to see what your friends were up to, find them, and invite them out in a simple, easy way that could leverage the location aspect of our app.

We also found out that people were not as interested in earning deals as much as they were interested in knowing about existing ones (ie Happy Hours etc). Along with the fact that partnering with bars to set up the earned deals would be a limiting factor in the beginning, we realized there would be more value to the users if we told them about the existing ones as well. This was also a great way to suggest places to go without being a clone of Yelp or other location suggestion apps.

IDEATION

From there we moved to prototyping which I did a lot of. I ended up creating and iterating on three clickable paper prototypes and began testing it with users. A lot of the earlier ideas we had separated the main areas of our app too much and created too many steps to get between them, so we iterated on the UI many times until we nailed the navigation and made sure the experience was both fun and cohesive.

PROTOTYPE

FINAL PROTOTYPE

Outcome:
●Adjusted Home screen
●Nights, Friends, and Deals pages unified in to a cohesive and easily accessible design
●Bar modules on the Deals page include a hint at the deal offered before having to click
●Track My Night button accessible at all times.

OUTCOME

Overall, I am very proud of the project. Previous projects had not allowed much time for the validation process which I found very valuable, the clickable prototype was very in depth and had a lot of interactions, and most importantly the client was excited about what we presented. Starting the project at a pre-development stage allowed my partner and I to concept every aspect and I felt a real ownership over it.

Other take-aways include:

• People are not as likely to share their night as we thought they would. They tend to be more interested in interacting with friends in real time (inviting them, sharing bar deals with the intention of meeting up).
• Though people think the idea of tracking their purchases is useful and a great feature, most are not sure if they want to know that information within the context of the app and want the option to turn it off.
• More people are influenced in to going to an advertised bar because of existing deals (eg happy hour deals) rather than the promise of earning them.

Want to learn more about this project?

MORE WORK!