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 a Product/UX Lead with no formal experience, my first objective was to get out into the streets of LA and talk to people. I created a survey that we used to conduct hundreds of impromptu interviews all over the city asking people how they approached making friends in LA, in addition to sharing a digital survey with our personal networks. I took all the data and feedback we received and distilled it down into key insights that I 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 and lessons along the way) we officially launched in Los Angeles in 2023.
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 registrations, short session duration, and long gaps between active sessions. At the time, we only had about 25 daily active users and 200 monthly active users. After monitoring user behavior, we realized they were only treating us as a discovery tool. Users would open our app to find an event to attend, then leave to coordinate their plans elsewhere. We were winning discovery and losing the social layer, which was the core of our mission.
We were hitting the discovery portion of our mission, but missing the social element. Users have plenty of options for finding things to do, but we wanted to differentiate ourselves as a place where connection and continued interaction leads to community-building.
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From discovery tool to a place people want to hang out
Deciding what to build to make users stay and connect
In addition to team brainstorming sessions, I used generative AI as a thought partner to flesh out ideas for new features. I then ran a series of small in-person group interviews with roughly 30 of our users where I previewed a few concepts I had designed and prototyped in Figma. User feedback helped me refine the list down to 3 features that tied directly to our objectives of increasing daily active users, average session duration, and user engagement. Since we had a very small team and limited resources, I worked with our engineer to prioritize features and structure our product roadmap.
Feature #1 - 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.
Feature #2 - Communities
A place for users to connect around similar interests and create recurring hangouts, ultimately leading to a sense of community and belonging.
Feature #3 - Profile Badges
Profile badges to gamify the experience and keep users engaged and interacting on the platform by tying desired user behavior to badge points.
Live Feed
Communities
Profile Badges
Badge Point System
To poll or not to poll, that is the question
Our initial build included a polling feature that we wanted to keep because it got a lot of use on our app. Unfortunately, it felt cluttered and redundant alongside Live Feed. Our user interview data gave us the confidence to temporarily remove the feature with the expectation that users would shift their behavior to polling interest via feed posts. They did, and we were later able to embed polls as a type of Live Feed post. A win-win.
It's my community, and I want it now
I began with a very robust design for our Communities feature that had a lot of nice components like a community feed, chat rooms, a multi-save photo gallery, and more. It looked great, but we simply did not have the resources to build everything by our targeted release date. I focused on the most important components that were central to our core objective, and resolved to build the nice-to-haves later. I got a firsthand understanding of building features out thoughtfully and strategically, instead of trying to build Rome in a day.
Results that speak for themselves
After I defined our objective, features, and roadmap, I put together a list of key results to measure our success. The list included meaningful increases in total users, daily active users, average session duration, and live feed activity. In addition to surpassing all of our goals, we received 5-star reviews in the App Store, with one user describing our platform as one of their favorite places to connect because it was "the new REAL social media". Our exact mission now being so well received by our users was beyond fulfilling.
8,500+
Total Users
Our goal was 100% growth from 2.5k users to 5k users. We achieved 325% growth from 2.5k to 8.5k users.
670
Daily Active Users
Our goal was 300% growth from 25 DAU to 100 DAU. We achieved 2,700% growth from 25 DAU to 670 DAU.
500
Live Feed impressions/wk
Our goal was 150 weekly live feed posts, comments, or likes per week. We achieved 500 impressions each week.
36 mins
Average Session Duration
Our goal was an average session duration of 30 minutes. We achieved average session duration of 36 minutes.