Social Meetup web app

Challenges

Timeline was our first challenge. We were asked to have this completed in 3 weeks. Now, I’m always up for a challenge, but there is a lot of research that goes into something like this. Here are the hurtled we had to tackle:

1. Social app communication. In app chat (Needed or not?)
2. Location services. How are people sharing their location?
3. Triangulation algorithm to process the distance between everyone and estimate a center.
4. Map and amenities integration. What types of places are we looking to meet up at?

Approach

Because of this type of project and the timeline. The design iteration was not a focus. Most people would be using their phone to access the site so the application needs to focus on mobile screen sizes.

Communication via the application was cut from MVP as the timeline crept up and it was proving to add many layers of complexity to the project for little benefit. 

Location services would need to have access to your location so a request would need to be made to the device you are using.

For Map integration we would keep it simple and only use Google Maps and affiliate API’s. 

Solution

This is best as a responsive web-app. That way, people behind a computer or phone would be able to enter their information. We used a combination of Materialize CSS and custom CSS to quickly pump out the design.

Invitations to the site user session were sent via text message to encourage users to use their mobile device.

All accounts were ‘guest’ accounts. Meaning it did not store your history longer than 1 day in our db. 

I figured out a way to find people’s locations via lat/lng, store them and then wrote an algorythm to estimate the central location between them. We initially wanted to use Google’s Business API’s but later figured out that it was very costly and the information was not as general or user spoken language as people are used to typing. We ended up using Yelp’s API’s which were much more useful for reviews and suggestions.

Learnings

Connecting devices isn’t a walk in the park, and it can get costly. Folks weren’t too thrilled about the ads or the confusion over who selected which requirement. It’s clear we need a better UX. And here’s the kicker – the experience varies from phone to phone. More testing is needed for a more standardized experience. Perhaps a tool like Storybook for UI consistency? And let’s not forget user feedback, crucial for a better evaluation of current features and insights into what people want added.