In my meeting with an accomplished design leader at Tencent, I asked him how to improve as an Interaction Designer. His first response was to "hone your ability to create high-quality high-fidelity prototypes with fast turnaround time."

Taking his advice to heart, I embarked on a short design sprint focusing on both high speed and high quality, and created a project I was satisfied with in five days. To this date, fast turnarounds remains as one of my key strengths noticed by my co-workers: maybe this is where it all started? :)

Meeting people is always fun, but sometimes sharing contact information isn’t. There is a lot of information to exchange—phone numbers, social media accounts, and in some cases, emails, Linkedin pages, and portfolio sites—which end up taking longer than desired. For this short project, I created a product concept that streamlines the information sharing process.

I decided to narrow the project's focus down to specifically USC students, due to the ease of user research and testing. For the initial research phase, I chose to take a qualitative approach as opposed to a qualitative one to obtain a clear big picture. An online survey fits the bill perfectly.

To keep the survey concise, only four questions were asked. I strove to ask only "factual" questions, prompting users to describe facts as opposed to leading them to answer in a certain way:

The online survey was sent out to an online student group chat and gathered 113 responses in about two days. 101 of them were valid answers (within the correct "user" population, does not provide obviously meaningless answers, etc). The following information is collected.

The survey results verified inconvenience as a major pain point in the process of contact sharing (80.2% of users interviewed), and the need of more than half (55.4% of the users interviewed) to address this problem. Roughly a fourth of the users indicated their willingness to accept the product as a paid service, which further proves the existence of the need. Based on the survey information, I formulated the design challenge:

I started off by thinking out loud and imagining a series of different solutions ranging from physical cards to stickers to mobile apps.

An early prominent idea was a website that people can use to input any contact information they want to share. Upon finishing, they can generate a QR code, which others can scan to be taken to a webpage with all the information they have entered.

I quickly built a mid-fidelity prototype of the above idea and began going around and asking for feedback. This time, I emphasized the qualitative approach: asking users to go through the screens carefully and having in-depth conversations with them about their experience. After a few rounds of testing, I began to see problems with the idea and ways to improve. Most of the feedback could be summarized into the three points below:

After synthesizing all the feedback and carefully reflecting on them, I redefined the design challenge and the how-might-we statement:

The foundation of an "easy to use" app is a clear and logical user flow. I created a flow chart for the entire app, ensuring that all the core functionalities are at most two clicks away from the main screen:

I then built a low-fidelity, clickable prototype for yet another round of user testing. This time, the goal of the user testing was evaluative rather than generative. I focused on accessing whether users are able to accomplish the desired tasks successfully and asked them for any moments of confusion and roadblocks:

Based on the user feedback, I edited my low-fi prototype accordingly, and kept the users' suggestions in mind when designing the hi-fi version.

It is vitally important to establish a strong brand identity for the app. Following the redefined "how might we" statement, I determined that the app should have a playful and dynamic style.

For the dominant color, I chose orange, which has strong associations with joy, enthusiasm, and social interaction. The supporting color is blue, which symbolizes open spaces and exploration, and will mainly be used on the "discover" page. To accentuate the visual dynamism of the app, I turned the main colors into gradients and employed a variety of bright accent colors.

When designing the specific UI elements, I emphasized the use of curves (circles and rounded corners) to add some additional playfulness.

One last thing I did to instill a playful "personality" into the app is creating custom mascots:

After finishing the hi-fi clickable prototype in Figma, I conducted individual user testing sessions with four college friends. Each person was able to use the app smoothly without assistance, and I received positive feedback on the visual look of the app as well as the dynamic animations.