Finding a Niche in Social Media

How focusing on diversity led to our app

Our team formed with a goal in mind, but no specific ideas. We knew that wanted to focus on promoting diversity in America. In this day and age, inclusion is so valuable to our society and the people in it.

To fix this, we wanted to approach this from a different perspective. Little by little, we hope that doing this will help fix the lack of equality and diversity throughout North America. We are all about inclusion.

With this vision in mind, several ideas came to light.

Ultimately the idea became to connect people over events and to recommend them based on users’ personality traits and background. We wanted a way to break the boundaries of social circles, and give people a fresh experience during their most valuable time — their free time.

We came to the name MixOut after brainstorming. MixOut combines the idea of getting something new, and getting out of your comfort zone.

The idea of MixOut is all about connecting people together. A user will visit our site, and answer a short questionnaire of three questions so we can learn more about them. When a user hits submit on that form, they are redirected to a map of events that match their personality. This match is based on the questionnaire, the event’s type, and on other attendee’s personalities.

The design of this application is modeled after services like Airbnb, Meetup, and dating sites. Unlike Airbnb or meetup, this application would focus on the user rather than the event in efforts to promote inclusion. Unlike dating sites, this application focuses on platonic relationships.

We want to connect people with like personalities and hobbies who otherwise would never meet each other in their current environment — to get them out of their comfort zone, and out of their personal bubble.

This app is made to promote inclusion. By meeting with people who are outside your normal circle of friends, you create relationships with a diverse cast of interesting people from all walks of life. Expanding a user’s horizons and leaving a positive social impact is what we want.

While this project would naturally benefit extroverts, it can have an equal benefit to introverts as well. Introverts might normally want to stay in for Friday nights, but if given the opportunity to go out with a few new people, then they can have a lot of fun!

We considered that a person might not want to meet with strangers at events. We want to ease comfort by using match algorithms, encouraging people to sign up to an event with a friend, and by promoting public events or settings where groups are more visible and safe. User reviews and ratings will also play a factor in helping our community stay safe.

If given a safe opportunity, we believe that our users will be willing to go out with new people on a Friday night just to have some good fun and meet new friends.

The design of our app has had a lot of thought behind it. For me personally, half the work of this project has been deciding things like colors, fonts, themes, styles, and visual hierarchy. The other half has been implementing those ideas into the front end.

We are still in the process of designing our logo, but as a placeholder, we are using the Twitter Emoji “Bottle with Popping Cork (1f37e)”.

Future logo iterations will emphasize wanderlust, warmth, wonder, adventure, and friendships. Ideas include:

We went for a day and night color scheme. We felt that these color schemes, in tandem with photos of landscapes and their sky, will evoke a sense of wonder and adventure. The styles that we use will emphasize the sky in our photos, so these colors will contrast them.

This also feels unique compared to other apps, who usually use reds greens or bright blues to invoke a different sort feeling. We want our users to feel adventurous. To feel this way, they would need to feel relaxed, outgoing, free, empowered, and positive.

The blues we use help inspire trust, luxury, and comfort. The light yellow we used makes our users feel positive, enlightened, and relaxed.

The midnight blues and daylight yellows also help emphasize that our application is great for all sorts of activities, day or night.

The fonts selected help amplify the adventurous, yet organized feeling of the app that we want to ensure.

We use the homestead font for our titles. This font is very adventurous, and has great styles to help invoke a new sense of wonder.

Raleway is delicate yet defined, giving a sense of order to our application—fitting for subheadings and organizational elements.

Lato is a very popular font. It has a somewhat regular appearance that is easy on the eyes, yet still feels warm and laid back. We use this font for our paragraphs and body text.

We took a large chunk of time designing the landing page. There is a large title that reads FIND NEW…FRIENDS/EXPERIENCES/PLACES/ETC. The last word in this title fades out and switches every three seconds.

The primary feature of our splash page is the simple title text, and the inspirational hero image. The text is designed to change with the colors behind it. In the future, the hero image on the home screen will change randomly if the user re-visits the page, and the text’s color will change with it.

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