Nudg
Status: Prototyping / Iterating
We are living in a technological age where we're able to instantly communicate with any number of people through our devices. Why then, with all our instant messaging devices and social media apps, is it so difficult to maintain relationships with those around us?
Enter Nudg. Nudg is relationship management app that helps users maintain and build relationships with their friends by sending a "nudg". The user can create automatic nudgs or manually input reminders, keep track of conversations and write follow-up notes-to-self, and view contacts in a "heat map" configuration which sorts contacts in order of communication frequency.
I worked as a designer on this team during my Junior Spring at the DALI Lab. Because this was Nudg’s first term at DALI, we started from a blank slate and conducted user interviews to understand our target audience’s needs. After some insightful discussions, we created our Feature Spec and Project Proposal. Then onto designing! I worked with the other designer on the team to create wireframes and high-fidelity mockups in Figma, which can be found here.
User Research
Initially, our project partner invisioned this app to be geared towards undergrad and graduate students for the purposes of networking. However, during user interviews with our target audience, we found that people were more interested in an app that helped them manage their relationships with people in their everyday lives. The nature of recruitment and networking didn't actually result in a compelling need for this app. Remembering to call your mother each week amidst the flurry of a 10-week term, however, was much more pressing.
With this new goal in mind, we created a list of feature specifications from our user journey map and personas
Sample Wireframe sketches
Sample High-Fidelity mockups
Link to Figma prototype here.
Our developers then took the designs and built the app - The front-end was written in React-Native and the backend uses Mongoose with Express and Node for React Native. This project is currently still being developed, so it’ll be awesome to see how it turns out!
