OVERVIEW
Stanford's "Design Kids", a student-run design studio, hosted its first-ever Designathon in May 2025, during which I and two of my closest friends + favorite designers participated. We chose to tackle the prompt from corner, an app meant to provide local experiences and assist with group planning, to encourage "Type B" friends to join the platform. This was a 24 hour challenge.
In our time, we conducted research and utilized several design methods (empathy mapping, user interviews, UI audit, comparative analyses, personas, and more) to find that "Type B" friends need a passive, low-effort, directed experience maximize their enjoyment on the platform; from what we saw, corner was currently geared towards those who actively sought new experiences, something that was unappealing to passive users who are usually down to do whatever.
Our pitch and final prototype had to be delivered in under 3 minutes. Feel free to check it out here!
SOLUTION
We created an all-encompassing solution that created appealing entry points and retention strategies for "Type B" friend groups, people with "Type A" partners, and individuals without friend groups who still want to coordinate with multiple, separate friends at once. This included:
I was the UI designer for our prototype, and I modeled our design system off of the current playfulness and excitement that corner has already established.
Though our solution didn't win, we were still so proud of what we were able to produce in such a short period of time. We feel that our all-encompassing solution creates appeal for all, and while we were limited to the time constraints of this project, if we were to revisit this, we would likely explore the demand for our solution through thorough user testing so that we could see what the next course of action would be.
Thank you to The Design Kids and corner for hosting us, and thank you to Amelie and Alan for taking this journey with me!
