JoinLinks
JoinLinks is a social app that I co-founded with a team of 3 friends who were fellow Los Angeles transplants. We created it with the goal of helping young adults like us make friends and build real community in an unfamiliar city. I was responsible for everything related to Product, UX, and UI.
Building for our users' reality, not our personal assumptions
As Product/UX Lead, my first objective was to get out into the streets of LA and talk to people. I created a survey, and we went to different coffee shops and venues all over the city to do impromptu interviews asking people how they approached making friends in LA. We interviewed over 200 people in addition to sending a digital survey out to our personal networks.
I took all the data and feedback we received and distilled it down into key insights that I then turned into user personas, user journey maps, and a product strategy to guide us through the build process.
After 2 years of user research, designing, coding, and testing (with many bumps along the way) we officially launched in Los Angeles in 2023.
From discovery tool to a place people want to hang out
Post-launch, we gained about 2,500 users in two years. In that time, we noticed a pattern of low user engagement defined by low event RSVPS, long gaps between active sessions, and short session duration. At the time, we had only 25 daily active users and 200 monthly active users.
After monitoring user behavior, we realized they seemed to be strictly treating us as a discovery tool. Users would open our app to find an event to attend, then leave to make their plans elsewhere. We were winning discovery and losing the social layer, which was the whole mission of our app.
We were hitting half of our mission and missing the half that made us social. Users have plenty of options for finding things to do, but our differentiator was supposed to be continued connection & interaction.
Deciding what to build to make our users stay & connect
I brainstormed a few concepts using AI as a thought partner, and ran a series of small in-person group interviews with about 30 existing users where I previewed ideas I had designed and prototyped in Figma.
User feedback helped me get the list down to 3 major features that tied directly to our objectives. Since we had a very small team and limited resources, I worked with the team to prioritize features and structure our roadmap.
Live Feed
A place where users could actively make plans to meet in the moment, share photos, and discuss events live. Essentially Twitter, but for in-person connection.
Communities
A place for users to connect around similar interests and facilitate the creation of recurring hangouts, ultimately leading to a sense of community and belonging.
Badges
Profile badges to gamify the experience and keep users engaged and interacting on the platform. Tying desired user behavior to badge points would help to encourage engagement.
Balancing tradeoffs
There were some key decisions we made that required tradeoffs
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Polls or no polls - our initial build included a polling feature that we really wanted to keep because users seemed to enjoy it; however, it felt cluttered and redundant alongside Live Feed. The data from my group interviews gave me the confidence to temporarily nix it with the hope that users would shift to gauging interest with a feed post. They did! We were later able to make the polling feature a type of post within Live Feed and it worked beautifully.
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Communities regular or Communities Plus - I started with a really robust design idea for Communities that had a lot of great features like a photo gallery, general chat rooms, a community feed, etc. It required a lot of time. We decided it was most important to provide users a place to gather with the basics first, and we would phase in the extra features later. I learned a good lesson about building experiences out thoughtfully, and gradually instead of trying to tackle it all at once.
We wanted the best result for our user engagement push, but we needed to make reasonable adjustments to ensure we shipped efficiently.
Realizing real outcomes
When I defined our objective, features, and roadmap I also put together a few benchmarks to measure our success. We wanted to achieve:
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100% Total User Growth, to 5,000 users
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300% increase in Daily Active Users, to 100 DAU
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At least 150 weekly Live Feed impressions including posts, comments, & likes
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30-45 minute Average Session Duration
Outcomes
8,500+ Users
325% growth
670 DAU
2,700% growth
500 posts
& impressions/wk
41 minutes
Average session
We surpassed all of our targets, received new 5-star reviews in our app store, and even had a user describe our platform as one of their favorite places to connect because it was the "new REAL social media". Our exact mission being so well received by our users was beyond fulfilling.