Have you ever Googled "fun things to do in [enter town here]"? After surveying over a hundred people about 80% of people have. So here lies the problem, people are looking for fun things to do near them they just don't know where to find it. There are so many people in the world that don't know how to spend their weekend and end up sitting on their couch watching Netflix. BLAQ is about going out and exploring your town. Its about making memories with your friends, There are very few apps that encourage you to go and do, to get out there and be involved.
When I first came up with the idea, I asked nearly everyone I knew a variety of questions. I asked them if they would use an app to find things to do, where they turn to find fun things to do, etc. Through talking with people, my idea was reinforced that there is a need for such an app. At this point I got excited and built a web app. I went in with nearly no planning, no empathy for the user I just wanted BLAQ to exist. As a result I got the ugly interface you see to your left, BLAQ V1. It was simply a menu with a list of cool things to do. The navigation was bad and it didn't provide anything more than Google. This was my first experience building an interface, it was a rough first go but I began getting excited about how the app could look and behave.
I realized that the web app didn't completely solve the problem and that there are a lot of events that are time sensitive. At this point I split the app into two parts. One part being a static list holding bucket list like items, unique to an area and the second part a dynamic list that contains upcoming time sensitive events. This allows people to check out events going on during a specific weekend or find things to do that are availableany day at any time. It was around this time I started getting into UX. I started building V2. I thought about situations where the user would open the app, and what they would would be looking for. I realized that users would only open the app when they are looking for something to do. I decided to put the list of things to do on the first page the users see. I also decided to display which city list the user is looking at so that if they change locations there is no confusion as to which list they are looking at. My second iteration was better but I knew it still wasnt complete.
I realized that the web app didn't completely solve the problem and that there are a lot of events that are time sensitive. At this point I split the app into two parts. One part being a static list holding bucket list like items, unique to an area and the second part a dynamic list that contains upcoming time sensitive events. This allows people to check out events going on during a specific weekend or find things to do that are availableany day at any time. It was around this time I started getting into UX. I started building V2. I thought about situations where the user would open the app, and what they would would be looking for. I realized that users would only open the app when they are looking for something to do. I decided to put the list of things to do on the first page the users see. I also decided to display which city list the user is looking at so that if they change locations there is no confusion as to which list they are looking at. My second iteration was better but I knew it still wasnt complete.
It was in the third iteration that my UX process became more solidified. I assembled a team of other students and we started discussing our vision, how we were going to solve the problem, what features we would need and what interaction it would have with other users. We started doing real research. We created a Qualtics Survey and sent it across social media and got a great response. This was incredibly eye opening. We learned that more than accomplishing bucket list items or being on a leader board people are motivated by doing things with there friends (see graph below). We also learned that people are willing to drive farther than we thought. Over 80% of people said that they would be willing to drive up to 30 minutes for an activity they were interested in. This caused us to change our list from being town specific to area specific. This also allowed us to put more things on one list and increase the chance of displaying events users would enjoy.
It was in the third iteration that my UX process became more solidified. I assembled a team of other students and we started discussing our vision, how we were going to solve the problem, what features we would need and what interaction it would have with other users. We started doing real research. We created a Qualtics Survey and sent it across social media and got a great response. This was incredibly eye opening. We learned that more than accomplishing bucket list items or being on a leader board people are motivated by doing things with there friends (see graph below). We also learned that people are willing to drive farther than we thought. Over 80% of people said that they would be willing to drive up to 30 minutes for an activity they were interested in. This caused us to change our list from being town specific to area specific. This also allowed us to put more things on one list and increase the chance of displaying events users would enjoy.
After learning from our survey, we built a rad new logo and began building wireframes and hi-fidelity mock ups. We added features that allow you to invite friends to go to events with you. As well as, the ability to see what others are doing and request to join them. We also completely changed the navigation of the app. We followed material design principles to create a beautiful design with fluid navigation. We were inspired by Pokemon Go to create user accounts that would allow you to level up and reach different statuses that users could compare amongst friends.
To the left is our current design, we are still tweaking the deisgn and iterating through some of our features. We recently built an invision prototype that will soon be used for user testing. I have also started developing this app in Android studio we hope to have our app released in the Summer of 2017. I'll keep you posted.
