Let’s PlatIt!
An IOS app to explore places with locals.
My Role: Software Developer Intern at Facebook
Team: 3 developers
Timeline: 5 weeks in Summer, 2019
Mission: Improving the experience of travelling by making the world a friendlier place.
Please note
This case study is focused on how I have changed as a Designer as this Software Engineering project started my interest in Design. After this project, I improved my Design thinking and UI/UX design skills significantly through classes at Dartmouth College. However, this project shows my skills of being able to think about Design in conjunction with my Software development skills and passion for creating human centric products.
Problem
Exploring new cities is daunting, especially when you do not know any people there. To be more culturally immersed one needs to go beyond tourist spots and explore the places by becoming friends with locals. However, tourists and locals both are vary of safety and do not have a space they can meet one another to have a second pair of eyes looking at the city.
How might we integrate tourists into the culture of a city?
Solution
An iOS mobile application that connects users- tourists and locals- with one another through happenings in the city.
Research
To be able to create a unique application we did market research on applications that help explore places or happenings. We also asked fellow interns what their experiences with travel apps were.
We came to the conclusion that what sets us apart is our focus on connecting people with each other rather than tourists to a place or an event. Our user persona, hence, is —
a young active tourist looking to explore the real charm of the city and become friends with some locals to show her around.
Brainstorming
We then dived right into deciding what features we wish to have in the app and prioritised them to be able to code features accordingly. It is hard to estimate exactly how much you can finish coding in 5 weeks especially with two unknown people as your teammates so this was a crucial step.
Being a software development project we also had to brainstorm how we were going to code the application and how we would store information. This required googling, seeking advise from our intern manager, and discussing efficient solutions.
Page #1: Home
The home page is super user friendly for those who do not want to engage entirely on the app or are doing so for the first time. It follows a general pattern like other iOS event planning apps to make it intuitive to use and looks neat and formal. The information is queried by location and user interests and users can also search for specific events. This allows the information to be as personalised as possible. The interests order is based on tags that appear on the user’s profile making it a personal query which other apps fail to have. From here the user can click on the events to learn more and add it to their calendar to not forget on the day if they are planners
Page #2: Accepting Events
The ‘Choose Events’ page creates events around the user as cards that they can accept or decline by swiping right or left on events — the classic ‘Tinder Swipe’. You can also reshuffle the cards to see other events. I show the events based on location and show them as pins on the map of the category type of the event like Google Maps (dining, market, etc.). One can see the details of the event without needing any clicks and can also be directed to the event by connecting the application to Google Maps. This ensures that the app is not a stand alone one but integrates with other apps used on their phone to make it more trust worthy and used.
Page #3: Creating events
If users do not like the events that are already created by people around, they can create their own events that other people can accept. Tourists may have specific things on their to do list that they wish to do and having someone to do it with can be so much better. Looking back now with my design knowledge, I acknowledge the poor choice of excess color on the screen and the lack of finesse to the application which I wish could be improved then. The camera image to upload an image is clearly intuitive due to poor choice of the image. However, it successfully creates an event from user input.
Page #4: Chat Groups
Once the user accepts an event, they are added to a group of people who also accepted that event. This way, users can meet like-minded people. This is a platform for everyone to co-ordinate going to the event or send pictures afterwards or generally discuss their views on the event. This builds community and possibly friends that users would like to personally text for another event in the future if they click. Here users can delete or exit out of events if they delete the group. The groups are also automatically deleted 3 weeks after the event to prevent clutter and data overload on the app. User research revealed this as the optimum time after the event that groups chats die down.
Page #5: Chat
For each event, users can chat with one another. To improve accessibility of the application and allow for mixing of cultures, I thought translation was crucial on the application. We use the Google Translate API to translate all incoming messages to the preferred language to prevent language from being a barrier to travelling which is often a large issue and why people like travelling with locals. Additionally, with message reactions, it is easier to respond to one another without messages when it is a large group of people. I also coded it such that after an x number or maximum attendees the group is capped off and would create a new group for the users that accept the event later.
Page#6: Log In and Sign up
The users can easily log in through touch id or logging in the conventional way. I thought of modelling the sign up like Apple Music does to add the interest tags mentioned previously mentioned for querying in an easily interpretable way. Looking back again, I see why Style Guides are so important to keep things uniform across an application.
This is also a good time to note how difficult it was for me to make this PlanIt logo on different online sites with several shapes which would’ve taken just 5–7 minutes in Figma. It shows me the power of Figma and design once you build the skill for it.
The tags show under ‘my interests’ on the home page. Users can edit these by long pressing the tags like the Apple home screen does. The bubbles shake and are editable. Users can befriend other users here, send them a private message and connect to their other social media links.
Learnings
- This project truly made me understand the power of Design and how important it is within the product world.
- While I have always valued design insights and am passionate about creating products, this was the first time I noticed the amount of thought that needs to go into designing a product for it to be successful.
- The thought put into the application was not in vain but went noticded by my fellow interns and managers. My team won the best iOS application amongst 108 Summer Facebook interns in Menlo Park and Seattle. As a reward we got to pitch PlanIt to Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook who really appreciated the thought we put into tuning our application to fit the users and the number of features we were able to code in such a short period of time.
- I can see how much I have grown in a year through Design classes at Dartmouth that I hope to implement in the apps I make in the future.
- A personal next step for me was to publish this iOS application coded in Objective C on the App Store, however, tight restrictions and requiring removing large amounts of code would make the application ineffective in its purpose so I chose not to pursue this application. I, hence, learned the technical challenges in coding an application versus publishing it, including legal barriers and maintaining standards as per Apple guidelines.
Gratitude
Thank you so much to my intern team, my manager, and Facebook for giving me the opportunity to learn so much.
Thank you for reading!
