CONTEXT
Timeline
November 2021 - Present
My Role
Visual Design
High Fidelity Flows
Prototyping
Web Design
Branding
Team (Co-Founders)
Krishna P. (Engineering)
Grace B. (Engineering)
Me! (Design)
Overview
Mezzo is a mobile application that plans social meetups by finding common overlaps between calendars and preferences (food/activity).
The initial idea for Mezzo sprouted during a weekend retreat hosted by the University of Washington’s Lavin Entrepreneurship Program. During the retreat, all of the students were placed into random teams with 4 hours to brainstorm and pitch an idea to a panel of judges. After the event, we thought the problem space was really interesting and wanted to pursue it further. Grace, Krishna, and I have since been designing the overall user experience, and I’ve specifically been designing the interface. We plan to launch the app this fall across the UW and beyond.
Problem
Planning meetups is difficult.
Finding a mutually convenient time, location, and activity is time-consuming. Amongst the back and forth phone tag over aligning busy schedules and figuring out where to go, plans get lost, and rescheduling gets in the way of meaningful connection.
As a college student, I’ve experienced the challenge of organizing group projects or grabbing food with friends. This problem is widespread, ranging from coffee chats to study groups, first dates, and even client dinners.
Solution
Mezzo is the end-to-end solution for planning when to meet, where to meet, and what to do.
Mezzo (Italian for “middle”) is a mobile application that plans meetups from start to finish, so your time is spent on enjoying a great meetup! By integrating your external calendars and collecting your food/activity preferences, Mezzo can instantly suggest meetup recommendations based on you and your invitee’s schedule and preference overlaps!
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
There's no middle ground.
Professional tools saturate the scheduling space. Within an company, tools like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook offered a way to easily find availabilities in colleague’s schedules. Outside of an organization, tools like Calendly or When2Meet are also used within a professional setting. (It would be a little odd to use Calendly to schedule a first date.)
On the other side, for finding mutually enjoyed activities… services like Yelp or Google Maps exist and provide great recommendations based on reviews and proximity to your location. Other services for group events offer an activity-first approach, like meetup.com, where events are suggested before even determining who’d be attending.
Venn diagram comparing location/activity against time planning apps.
In the end, the most important discovery we made was that these tools only handled certain aspects of planning, like Calendly with time scheduling or Yelp with activity suggestions. There was a lack of a product that bridged the two areas together. So we thought that we could fit in, as a meetup scheduling tool with a social and people-first approach.
USER INTERVIEWS
97% thought planning meetups could be more easier…
Before designing anything, I wanted to make sure this was a problem that truly resonated with people.
So we surveyed 123 people about their general behaviors with meetup planning. I also then dived deeper and interviewed 20 more individuals ranging from college students to adults.
Some of the people I interviewed over Zoom.
Some of the key questions from the interviews include:
1. What mediums or technologies do you use to plan meetups (text, call, messaging app, in-person, etc.)?
2. Describe the groups or types of people you meet up with and with what frequency.
3. How do you usually decide on the date and time of your meetups?
4. How do you usually decide on the location of your meetups?
5. How do you usually decide on the activity of your meetups?
6. How often do you find yourself planning meetups that do not happen?
7. On a scale of 1 to 5, how difficult do you find this process of planning meetups (including determining the date, time, location, and activity)?
8. What parts of planning a meetup frustrate you MOST?
9. Are you satisfied with the methods you currently use to plan meetups? Why or why not?
THE MAIN INSIGHT
The back-and-forth phone tag is normalized.
Based on the trends in the demographics from the interviewees and surveys, this problem is present for busy, on-the-go individuals.
1. The typical back-and-forth tag over text messages is annoying and inefficient, but is normalized. This process could definitely be improved.
2. Finding a common time is the hardest part of planning a meetup that works for everyone, especially in a large group setting.
3. Most meetups are planned digitally on mobile devices, rather than in-person or over the phone.
OPPORTUNITY
How might we automate the meetup planning process and eliminate the back-and-forth phone tag?
IDEATING SOLUTIONS
“Meet me in the middle”?
As we began brainstorming possible solutions, we thought about “meet me in the middle”, where we would help people find perfect spots to meet with equal travel time...
Eventually, this idea evolved into designing a single platform that would help people figure out (1) when to meet (2) where to meet AND (3) what to do.
As mobile devices are used to plan most casual meetups, we decided that starting with a mobile app and then expanding to a web app would be the best strategy.
I began drafting ideas on paper, and with a social focus, l explored the idea of having an activity feed become the main component of the app.
The early iterations of Mezzo (and my first time using Figma).
ITERATIONS
3 major improvements!
Based on feedback, the designs continued to improve. I learned that people don’t always need help determining all three aspects of the meetup (when, where, and what). For example, you want to grab coffee at your favorite local coffee shop with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, so you only need the “when” since you already know the "where". This is why I introduced designs that include the possibility of having any combination of the three aspects.
New "Help Me Find a Common" section.
Old vs new home page.
Having a clearer and organized home page lets users quickly see who they’re meeting with and track the progress of the various meetups.
Changes:
1. Clearer sections (Incoming Requests, Waiting for Invitees, Active, & Scheduled).
2. Event names became more prominent than the person.
3. Profile pictures are more visible.
4. Larger “Create a Mezzo” button.
Eliminating the “Days of the Week” option declutters the screen and makes navigating easier. Since the user already provided us access to their calendar, it makes more sense to pick specific days of the week.
Simplified way to input potential dates.
THE latest DESIGNs
Meet Mezzo.
Right from the first time you ever see a Mezzo invitation text message, you’ll be able to open it in our web-app and participate without needing to download the app. You will only have to download the app when you want to personalize or schedule your own meetups.
When you download Mezzo, you'll set up your profile. You’ll be prompted to integrate your external calendar and input your food/activity preferences.
Once you create a meetup, invitees can join and receive mutually convenient recommendations for the time, location, and activity.
The designs feature a light-themed background that keeps the app clean and inviting, contrasting with a dark theme. I chose a purple color with orange accents to maintain a consistent color scheme throughout the app and warm colors to feel inviting.
The “Create a Mezzo” screens are designed to be a popup rather than full pages because this gives the impression that this process will be short and temporary.
Mezzo onboarding.
Creating a Mezzo.
Joining a Mezzo.
CONCLUSION + ACHIEVEMENTS
Some awards & next steps.
November 2021: Placed 1st out of 35 teams at UW’s Startup-a-Thon.
January 2022: Awarded “Most Enthusiastic Entrepreneurs” at SEBA Science & Technology Showcase.
February 2022: Semifinalist in Princeton University’s TigerLaunch Competition (15 out of 460 teams).
March 2022: Semifinalist in 2022 Northwest Entrepreneur Competition
May 2022: Graduated as 1 of 5 projects from DubHacks Next (an incubator at UW backed by Madrona, Techstars, AWS, and more).
May 2022: Top 36 (out of 83) in UW’s Dempsey Business Plan Competition
Photo on the left is when we won our first competition, UW's Startup-a-thon! Center Photo is from UW's Dempsey Startup Competition. Photo on the right is during Demo Day of DubHacks Next Incubator.
Mezzo is a continual project that we’re working on. In April 2022, we onboarded two student developers from UW to help accelerate our development efforts. We plan to continue coding to launch Mezzo across the University of Washington at the start of the fall quarter!
LESSONS LEARNED
What I’d do differently next time.
1. Make every decision trying to create the most incredible user experience. In the beginning, I focused on designing the best-looking interface. I’ve realized that the onboarding process needs to be incredibly easy with a viral-growth-based app like Mezzo. From the first interaction, the experience must be seamless to have users share with their friends.
2. Spend more time learning about the problem space and current solutions. Although we surveyed 120+ individuals and had 1:1 interviews with 10+ people, I wish we had spent more time understanding and researching our competitors at the start. We could have defined our niche of social-based meetup scheduling service quicker.
3. Figma is amazing! A few months after I started this project on Adobe Xd, I realized how impractical it was that my team couldn’t make edits. It was also frustrating to share my designs with our developers. I ended up redesigning everything on Figma, and now I love it :)
Thanks for reading :)