Creatives Abroad is a mobile app helping creatives connect with like-minded people and find experiences while living abroad.
Role: UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher
Duration: 6 weeks
Tool: Figma
Starting a new life abroad can be exciting yet challenging.
How has being a creative influenced the lives
of expats?
What solution would provide the greatest benefit for creative people
living abroad?
How do expats respond to an app to help them make more intentional connections?
Background, The Problem, & Solution
Secondary Research, Competitive Analysis, User Interviews
Information Architecture, Flows, Wireframes
User Testing, Iterations, Final Thoughts, Next Steps
Living abroad as a creative can be tough, especially when it comes to finding like-minded friends. As an expat, I've experienced this challenge firsthand.
What occurs when ambitious travelers are placed somewhere without a means to connect with each other?
Creatives living abroad often struggle to connect with similar-minded individuals and find local events and experiences to engage with.
Hypothesis: An app dedicated to connecting creative people and showcasing creative events will help to enhance foreigners' experiences while living abroad.
I knew from brief conversations with people in my community that this was a challenge many other creatives faced, especially now during the pandemic. However, I wanted to dig deeper and talk to more creative people who currently live or have lived abroad and have an interest in connecting with like-minded individuals to test this hypothesis.
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At the end of the survey I asked for volunteers to share more about their experiences during an interview. Nine people responded with their email, however when it was time to schedule, I struggled to find reliable volunteers. In the future I would allocate more time to finding and scheduling so I don’t run behind schedule trying to complete interviews.
Five creatives shared their experiences of living abroad, how it impacted their creativity and how it affected the way they made friends and found social events. As an expat myself, I was able to empathize with at least one thing each of them mentioned. But of course there were several overlapping similarities across all their stories.
Living abroad can be a great opportunity filled with adventure for many people, but it isn’t always perfect. This change of environment impacted their creativity in many ways. They were mostly positive, but sometimes feelings of isolation, lack of motivation and insecurities came up.
After gathering the data from the interviews, I felt lost. I started to question my original idea because their histories with other social apps was insignificant, and, though their personalities differed, they had all made friends in the past through social gatherings and relied on mutual friends and word of mouth to find events and experiences. So, I wondered if an app would be the right solution.
After speaking with my mentor, I realized that the objective could be different for different users. Some may be more focused on making friends through the app, while others who prefer to connect in person would benefit more from finding events and experiences. I just needed to stop overthinking it and focus.
Meeting people online has become the new normal these days, especially since the start of the pandemic, so I knew creating an experience around connecting virtually wouldn't be groundbreaking. However, after assessing several competitors, I realized a few key things. No one platform achieved the goals of: catering to the creative niche, allowing people to connect through similar interests, and finding creative experiences.
Based on my research, I found that the main goals for the target users were to feel creatively inspired, meet people with similar interests, attend creative events to make friends. To convey that, I mapped out how users would go through the platform.
An onboarding was important to introduce the app to new users and show them how they could benefit from signing up. Through research, I also found that there may be different objectives for different users. For example, the more extroverted users who prefer to meet in person could utilize the Experiences feature for discovering those events to attend. While the users that didn't mind connecting virtually could find it beneficial to utilize the Connections feature.
It was so insightful to get to know the experiences of other fellow creative expats and to try to find a solution that can help then thrive while living abroad. In the future, I plan to expand on the features adding in-app virtual events and experiences as well as video and phone call options with connections.
How I would measure success: