Dive is a mobile app built with Typescript and React that connects people to others inside or outside of their culture to encourage diversity, personal connection, and friendship. My team of 5 worked on the front-end of Dive for Microsoft's New Technologist program.
Before we could begin creating our project, we had to decide upon a prompt.
We chose to build the front-end of an app focused on removing barriers to expressing and sharing ideas.
We then tried to brainstorm potential audiences that could best fit this prompt. We came up with a whole slew of ideas such as:
We started talking more and more about our cultural backgrounds and identities, whatit was like growing up in our ethnic households, and the many difficulties that came with being a first generation student. From language barriers with our parents to feeling too "Americanized" to being alienated from our culture, we all realized we shared a very similar experience despite coming from such different backgrounds.
We realized that we were all so extremely passionate about this idea and decided to choose it as the focus of our app.
We started to develop potential problem statements to properly narrow the scope of our project ot tackle specific issues. In order to do this, we created empathy maps for our potential user audience. These were maps that helped us better understand our users, their needs, and their problems. It was broken into four sections: what the user says, what the user thinks, what the user does and what the user feels.
Says:
Thinks:
Does:
Feels:
After these, we were able to isolate some unifying issues and problems that users ran into, and we compiled these into "How Might we" (HMW) statements:
We then drafted up our problem statement to guid eus for the rest of our project:
How can we help our generatoin feel more connected and accepted within their culture? How can we help our generation better understand cultural experiences that differ from their own? How can we help make our generation more comfortable with talking about their culture?
We then did something known as Crazy 8s where you have 5 minutes to draw pictures of 8 potential solutions to our problem statement. We came up with these ideas:
Once we did this, we tried to envision how our app would look like. We decided we wanted to create an app that encouraged conversations surrounding culture since one of the biggest barriers to culture was a stigma surrounding its discussion. We knew the app would then be primarily a “pen pal app”, as we personally found that one on one connections were more meaningful and led to longer and more thorough conversations than group ones. Some other features we made:
We started off with paper prototypes, drawing out the app to figure out what stuck. Here are some features we liked from our paper prototypes:
We then created an 8 question user survey to decide some things we were concerned about, like how long the algorithm should search for a connection before timing out or if profiles should default to anonymous. We also wanted to see if there was an actual audience for our app, so we asked people's willingness to connect with people inside and outside of their culture from a scale of 1-10.
We then made mock-ups of the app in Framer.
We then coded our app using React before creating our demo, which you can find at the very top of this page.