Foodie Dawgs: Meeting New Friends Made Easy
Jason Guo, Michael Sy, Greg Senk
Problem and Solution Overview
Many college students desire more opportunity to develop meaningful friendships with like-minded individuals, but struggle to reach out, find time to develop connections, or to find others with similar interests. These problems are exacerbated by tight budgets and busy calendars. In order to combat these problems, we are designing a mobile application built to connect users with a small group of like minded folks for coffee, a snack, or a meal somewhere near the University of Washington at a discount.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
Our goal was to get a better understanding of the experiences of these college students with respect to making and maintaining friendships. We also wanted to find common challenges that discourage students from making new friends in a new environment. We decided to conduct interviews with a diverse group of college students at the University of Washington, including international, domestic out-of-state and in-state students. We asked them questions such as “Do you find making new friends in a new environment relatively easy or difficult? Why?” and “Have you experienced any challenges or obstacles that have gotten in the way of you meeting new people? If so, would you mind describing these challenges?”. We also created a survey asking similar questions and sent it out to various groups of students at UW to fill out. The survey gave us a baseline understanding that guided our user interviews, while the interviews allowed us to ask more specific questions to flush out that understanding more. We used these research methods because making friends is a highly individual experience, and we wanted to hear directly about what that experience is like from our target users.
Design Research Results and Themes
After conducting our research, we gathered useful data regarding how college students make new friends and what challenges they face. We received a diverse range of responses from college students and noticed a wealth of different experiences when it comes to making friends. We identified some common challenges among our target users. Our research participants tended to feel like they had little time to make efforts to meet new people and maintain new friendships. Many felt uncomfortable reaching out to unfamiliar people and initiating a conversation. In addition, some struggle with cultural and language barriers to making new friends in a new environment.
Our survey reached 33 respondents from 18–24 years old, from first year college students to graduate students, from locals to international students, all with varying experiences developing friendships in college. In their responses, they described that they usually meet new friends through school — student clubs, residence halls, classes, and friends of friends.
We interviewed 5 college students and had meaningful conversations with them to learn about their experiences making new friends in college. We learned that they have different levels of desire for making new friends. For some of them coming to college with many friends they already know, they mentioned that they do not feel a strong desire to make new friends. During the interviews, we asked our participants to describe whether they are an introvert or extrovert, and we found that introverted people tend to find it harder making new friends in a new environment. We also noted that many of our interviewees said they like to meet up with their friends for coffee and food. In addition, we learned that international students whose first language is not English may not feel very confident and comfortable reaching out to others who do not speak their first language, which causes them to often form tight-knit circles only with folks who are from the same country of origin.
Proposed Design
Our research pointed to a few key challenges we needed to address in order to reach our target audience. The first is that college students have little free time. We found this response frequently throughout our user research, and we believe that our proposed mobile application design can help college students find time out of their day to meet up with new people and have a nice social experience, while requiring relatively little time spent using the application itself. Further, students already tend to use their phones a lot throughout the day, so a mobile application will be easily accessible and learnable to them.
Our design also addresses that people often meet up with friends at restaurants and coffee shops, which was found during our user research. To help users feel more comfortable meeting new people and reduce the cost of hanging out, we partner with local businesses to offer users discounts when they visit those restaurants and coffee shops as a meet-up group. This not only makes the meet-up cheaper and safer for users as they meet others in public, it also provides small businesses with more customers.
As shown in figure 1, Our application asks users about their interests and food preferences, as well as their upcoming availability. It uses this information to match the user up with other students with similar interests, time availability, and restaurant preferences, and it picks out one of the restaurants that we have partnered with to be the designated location for the meetup. The app will then notify the users when the reservation is placed as well as a special discount that users will get when they show up as a meet-up group. After users attend the meet-up, they will be able to follow up with those they just met and continue the conversation if they wish.
With a more personalized and affordable meet-up experience at local restaurants and coffee shops, users will have opportunities to find available time to socialize, meet others with common interests, save money during meet-ups, and stay connected with their new friends after meet-ups. In conclusion, our application meets two significant needs of our users — arranging times for hanging out with friends and making hanging out more affordable. The app will serve as a convenient tool for University of Washington students to expand their network and meet new friends who they can count on in college and beyond.
Figure 1. A storyboard showing a college student who has little free time attending a meetup through the app.
Fig 2. A college student receives discounts at an ice cream shop when participating in an arranged meet-up
