How do you create ‘real’ memories in a pandemic?

A UX Case Study | Creating a mobile concept to socialise remotely

7 min readMar 22, 2021

Executive Summary

A solo concept sprint, designing a native mobile app called the Virtual Events Club into a clickable prototype of sketches in Marvel. This was my first UX project with General Assembly.

Duration: 1 Week

My Process: User Interview, Experience Map, Initial Sketches, Storyboard, User Flow, Paper Prototype, Iterations and Final Clickable Paper Prototype.

The Brief

For this project I was tasked with creating a native app to help with socialising remotely. Being a social butterfly, Debbie wanted a way to meet up with her group of friends remotely, to create, in her words, “real memories”.

This app would need to:

make organising easy and encourage friends to get involved
avoid the dreaded back and forth with endless dates, times, and technical issues

Unearthing insights

I conducted two interviews remotely with Debbie, to better understand her needs, motivation and behaviour. I used open questions covering her social life and spare time before deep diving into the most relevant areas.

Key Interview Findings:

Debbie has been feeling isolated at home in lockdown
She is usually really social and she missed making real memories with her friends, doing normal things.
She is finding it really hard to organise meet ups remotely, especially for larger groups of friends.
She wishes there was an easy way to get everyone together, at a time that suits everyone, and do something fun!
For her, video calls are getting boring — she’s getting video call fatigue.

(Yes, I do see the irony here doing my user interview on another video call!)

How could I make this easier and more fun for her and her friends?

To help answer this question, we discussed one of her most recent difficult experiences of trying to organise a group call with her friends. She was able to show me how this played out when messaging them.

Debbie’s group conversation trying to organise a video call with friends, that did not work out!

After mapping her journey, I learned her frustrations peaked when trying to find a time that suits most friends, and finding something fun to do other than a normal video call.

The problem became apparent:

Debbie needs a way to organise fun activities virtually with her group of friends, at a time that suits most people because she wants to socialise in lockdown, feel less isolated and wants to create “real memories.”

Creating the concept

Initial ideas ranged from simply picking a suitable time to chat from a small selection of times, having 5 minute mini games in a call, through to incorporating fun events into your video call.

Taking all these ideas into consideration, the concept I decided to take forward included the following elements:

another aspect to the standard video call experience, by including a virtual event — something Debbie and her friends would have usually attended in person
By changing the focus onto an event, the issues of setting a time and date that would suit everyone would be somewhat removed, resembling more of how they would have organised pre-pandemic.

They would now be able to have an event to look forward to, that offered a virtual experience they could join in together. I went with the ‘Virtual Events Club’ concept. It best addressed her frustrations with trying to social remotely with her group of friends.

Storyboarding the solution

The story of Debbie and her friends socialising at a virtual event

I created a storyboard to represent how this app could improve Debbie’s ability to socialise remotely in a more interactive way.

Debbie is working from home, and is sad because she misses socialising with her friends.
She starts using a mobile app for virtual events that you can join as a group.
They all join a cocktail making class being held online.
Debbie is connected with her group of friends and is having fun making new memories.

Developing a User Flow

I then began to explore her possible user flow, to help prioritise features and streamline her journey to have fun with her friends.

Mocking it up

Paper prototyping is extremely helpful at the early stage of conceptualising an idea. It allows the user to interact with the idea quickly, with the ability to iterate rapidly at a low cost and with low commitment. Early feedback from real users can be invaluable, and often people are more comfortable providing criticism to sketches rather than polished designs which look like you’ve spent a lot of time on.

With this in mind, I sketched out a paper prototype. I wanted to test out the interface, functionality and features with Debbie, and I expanded my testing with two other users. This was helpful in highlighting areas that needed further improvement in order to make the app experience as intuitive as possible.

The Initial Paper Wireframes

A few assumptions were defined before testing. The user would have downloaded the app, set up an account and added their group of friends into an ‘events club group.’ The user would then follow these steps:

A user begins by getting a notification to vote for an event for their events club group to join this weekend.
The app generates a curated list of four virtual events with dates and times visible. Also shown is who else in the group has already voted for each event.
The user can then look into more details about each event, and cast their vote.
The winning event will then be announced as the ‘Top Vote’.
At the time of the event, the user would get another notification, allowing an easy click through to the event.
The user joins and enjoy with their events club group.
Finally, after the event, the user can rate the event, helping the app learn which events the group would be interested in in the future.

My goal was to make it as easy as possible for the users to select their favourite event, with a limited number of options of times and dates. I tried to keep the steps minimal as possible and give visual signposts throughout to make the process feel easy.

Testing it out

I conducted three user tests and was able to uncover some interesting insights to carry into the next prototype.

The following areas caused the most confusion for users and needed adapting:

Start of the journey was unclear, even with assumptions explained in advance
Expected to vote/like event on main events page
Wording of ‘Top Vote’ was not clear
Events page not obviously set up to show video of class and video of participants

Examples of iterations of wireframes. Changing the voting screen to the main screen, and Top Vote wording change

Thanks to the insights gained from use testing, I implemented several changes to the next iterations. Some examples include:

updating the voting screen to be included on the main events page
changing the wording used to show the winning event chosen by the group.

A clickable prototype can be viewed below.

Click play for the Marvel Prototype!

Final Thoughts

This was my first UX design sprint and the process was as fascinating as it was challenging. Whilst I took a lot on board over the over the five days, one became really clear to me, that sketches do not need to be perfect, they simply need to display sufficient detail to draw usable insight before proceeding. Quick and rough sketching allows for faster iterations to meet the user needs.

For future iterations, I will focus on refining the journey, making it as seamless as possible. I will also take a deeper dive into the information architecture, and build out the rest of the app. Finally, I would take it to the next level, iterating into mid and high fidelity.

Yay! You made it to the end! Thank you so much for reading.

If you would like to see other UX projects that I have worked on you can take a look at my Portfolio, or other Case Studies on Medium. Alternatively, if you’d like to discuss future work or simply say hi, please feel free to connect on LinkedIn.