Urban Loneliness

& Community Connection

Overview

Moving to a new city can be exciting, but for many young professionals, it also comes with a strong sense of isolation. This project explores how we might help this people build meaningful connections and feel a sense of belonging in unfamiliar environments.

This work was done in a team of three excellent designers and researchers, where we worked together to explore ideas, and gather the best key insights to achieve our final goal.

The goal was to design a solution that allow users to connect through shared interests and proximity. The intended outcome is to create an experience that helps users move from feeling isolated to feeling integrated, supported, and at home in their new city.

Problem Statement

Secondary Research

To come up with our problem statement, we first needed to understand the situation better. We started by doing secondary research, looking into data and statistics to confirm that this was a real problem worth solving.

We finally categorized this research in three common patterns that we spotted on this topic, the main causes were: Location Differences, Cultural Differences and Digital Impact.

User Interview & Affinity Diagram

We then moved to an (if not the most) essential part of our research, the user interview. For this section, we made sure that our interviewees were people that are going through a phase of loneliness because they moved to a new location.

This process helped us redefine our main concerns and topics that leads to a feeling of isolation and loneliness but most important, we gathered some ideas and insights that helped us to build our user persona, but before moving to that part, we needed to organize our interviews in different sections and themes, thats when the affinity diagram came to life.

User Persona & Journey Map

This is the moment where Sophie appears, she is a 31 year old professional that just recently moved to Berlin for work reasons, she used to be a social and active person but this new city has brought to her some challenges that made her struggle with making genuine connections and meeting new people.

Sophie is representing the whole community of ex-pats that are experiencing the same challenges and are looking for different ways to feel part of their new home.

We then proceeded to ideate Sophie’s journey following the answers that our interviewees gave us, so we could have an idea on what usually happens on a certain period of time.

After reviewing all these important steps we finally came with a final problem statement that summarizes it all in one phrase.

Ideation

After narrowing down our main problem into a single phrase, we moved on to the most exciting part of the project: the ideation phase. We chose the “Worst Idea” method to generate bizarre ideas and then tried to combine them in a way that made sense.

We end up building our solution based on two interesting ideas we picked out of all the propositions and we finally came up with our final result: an app designed to connect people through shared interests and location while making it interactive and focused on creating real, meaningful connections.

Process

User flow

To make us an idea on how this app could work and what features it should have, we designed a user flow based on Sophie. It’s important to clarify that our main focus was her in order to solve her main concerns.

Wireframes and Prototype

Once we defined the user flow, we moved into wire-framing to start shaping the experience of the app.

We designed the key screens that support Sophie’s journey from onboarding and setting preferences, to discovering communities, engaging with posts, and connecting with others close to her location.

Our goal was to prioritize clarity, usability, and flow, this helped us ensure that each step felt natural and supported the goal of building meaningful connections.

We then combined these screens into a low-fidelity prototype (made with Figma) which gave us a clearer picture of the overall experience and how users would move through the app in real life.

Testing

The final step was to test our prototype with different users to collect feedback and make improvements on our app, this process was key for us because it shaped the app based on user needs and interest.

Conclusion and Next Steps

This project allowed us to deeply understand the challenges young professionals face when moving to a new city, especially when it comes to building meaningful connections. Through research, ideation, and design, we were able to translate these insights into a solution that focuses on shared interests, proximity, and real-life interaction.

If we were to continue developing this project, the next steps would include refining the prototype with more detailed interactions and move to a medium or high fidelity prototype. We would also conduct a usability testing, and explore features that brings trust and safety, such as privacy controls and gradual location sharing.