Saplink
Grow your reach
iOS Mobile App Design
iOS Mobile App Design
It’s no secret that for most people, convenience is everything. We want the ability to simplify the networking process and remember where you did it. How many contacts do you have on LinkedIn and how many of them do you remember where you know them from? It requires mental effort to do this.
What if there was a simple, easy to navigate mobile application that could help you with your connections? Over the course of a two-week design I worked with a small team to design Saplink.
Saplink is an app that transforms the networking experience by creating a resource that facilitates the process of genuine connections. As a user, simply download the app, search for events, look for who is going, register as attendee, and make connections. The app can save all the information of your new connections!
To get the project started my team and I entered with the belief that people most likely feel overwhelmed by networking events and don’t always know where to start when they get there. We also believe that people probably value face-to-face interactions over solely digital connections. We believe people have frustrations with LinkedIn (i.e. too many connections they don’t know, not skilled enough at it, etc.).We believe people find networking to be awkward, overwhelming, and time consuming.
We wanted to understand how people feel about networking, making connections for business and personal life, as well as the tools available to them.
The individuals we interviewed people ranging from age 22 to 61 with careers in fields ranging from recruiting to dentistry, we found that most people find a lot of value in networking, but their relationship with it is a little more hate than love. We also also created a survey that was completed by 25 participants.
The survey was great for quickly gathering information from a sample of my target audience, while the interviews allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the participant's behaviors.
We had great feedback that made us think about the shareability and accessibility of some features. We organized our findings in an affinity diagram to identify the pain points and potential solutions that would be incorporated into future iterations.
After the interviews were conducted our person, Amy Turner, who was created to visually represent the information and ideas gathered from the user base we spoke with. During the design process, Amy helped us stay focused on who our potential user is, what their needs and goals are, ultimately keeping the human factor at the center of our thinking and design.
We believe that providing a simple and concise way for modern professionals to network and connect for job opportunities and/or collaborators will achieve a more seamless, integrated, and genuine networking experience for people in any field of work.
SAPLINK is bringing people back to the roots of networking: making genuine connections and enjoying the process of meeting others for professional, creative, and individual growth.
To illustrate the journey we encountered during our research, I created a storyboard. Here we see Amy feeling encouraged and ready to connect with new people in the events that happen in her city, but she feels nervous, until her friend tells her about a new app that will help with her networking. Illustrating this scenario helps highlight some of the common needs and pain-points the users we interviewed faced.
After figuring out our initial decision flow we began, as a team, sketching various screens and wireframing out what we needed to include, making adjustments along the way.
We created this set of mid-fidelity wireframes of all the screens necessary to complete the main user tasks that we will test
We conducted user testing on our mid-fidelity prototype on a mobile phone to see how users would complete certain tasks once they were given some context. We were curious if they new to scroll or tap in certain screens. . The goal was to identify pain points that could be improved in future iterations. The tasks we tested were:
- Sign up and Profile Creation
- Event Search
- Made a connection
- Look for a contact profile
I took the time to iterate over each screen, added a gameification to make the app more attractive and user friendly, users can get a badge for every number of connections they make, each badge has a message related to the number of connections and allows users have fun while connecting with other people.
View Prototype
Creating an end-to-end mobile app for a web app was certainly a big and tricky project. I needed to embody the existing experience, but improve at the same time. I’m please with the end result.
Although this project concluded with a solid prototype, We want to add a new feature where you can tell the attendees of the event what are you wearing to find themselves easier or a drop a pin with your location.