Helping MyPlace improve their group creation experience.

MyPlace, a real product with an active social platform, encourages building a community of like-minded travelers across the globe. It is a place to share your home with the people you trust; your family, friends, and trusted communities & networks. The idea of ‘Groups’ on MyPlace is that we all have different groups of friends and communities in the real world and we want to enable users to recreate or join the groups that are relevant to them and who they want to share their home with.

Helping MyPlace improve their group creation experience.

MyPlace is a platform to share your home with the people you trust. Your family, friends, and trusted communities / networks. The idea of ‘Groups’ on MyPlace is that we all have different groups of friends and communities in the real world and we want to enable users to recreate or join the groups that are relevant to them and who they want to share their home with.

Role

User Research

Product Strategy

UI Design

Interaction Design

End-to-end UX/UI Design Process

Tools

Figjam

Notion

Figma

Timeline

5 weeks

The Problem

MyPlace doesn't have the ability for users to create their own groups. Currently, the team at MyPlace can create a group for you if you email them, and give admin privileges to one person to manage the group.

The Solution

The solution is to design an onboarding flow that allows users to create groups seamlessly inside the app without having to leave the platform.

Usability Review

To get a better idea of the MyPlace platform, our team conducted a usability review of the current groups functionality. The first thing we immediately noticed is that the initial screen displays a large body of text concerning group rules before you see any images or information about group members or places.

Business & User Frustrations

Primary Frustration - Group Creation Process

Currently, users are unable to create their own groups without having to email a MyPlace team member. MyPlace's mission is to provide a platform for people to share their homes with people they trust, but their current user flow forces users to leave their app to form those groups. Automating this feature should provide relief for both the business and users.

Secondary Frustration - Safety & Security

Based on user interviews, users are also concerned about the safety and security of MyPlace. Considering that users are encouraged to share information about their homes, it's important they know that only trusted and vetted individuals are allowed into their group.

Competitor Benchmarking

As a part of our research, we studied an indirect competitor called Meetup and how they allow their users to create groups. Features that we found helpful included the progress bar along the top of each page and the streamlined onboarding process that guided users one step at a time.

Problem Space

Users are not motivated to share their homes on MyPlace because it is inconvenient to create public or private groups with people they trust.

How might we provide a smooth group creation experience?

Ideation

Our ideation phase included a mind map and prioritization matrix that allowed us to hone in on what features to include in our group onboarding process.

What can we improve

Currently, the process to add a group is to email MyPlace, so we will be building the new solution from the ground up.

What can we add

Some features we would like to add include a progress bar, keeping each step devoted to one question (similar to Meetup), and allowing users to create onboarding questions for their group members.


User Flows

The user flow we mapped illustrates the journey from the Myplace home dashboard where the user is able to easily start the group creation process. Each page focuses on one bite-sized piece of information, making it feel doable for the user to finish quickly. Once the process is completed, the user lands on their new group home page and is ready to customize and share their group.

Rapid Prototyping

Based on our research, our next step was to begin sketching low-fidelity wireframes to garner some initial thoughts on how to tackle the group creation process.

Styles & Components

As a part of this project, we were equipped with the existing MyPlace design system file in Figma to help guide any decisions we make regarding the user interface. We also created new components that complimented their current design to give MyPlace a fresh feel.

High Fidelity Prototype

In our new prototype, we strived to pair the current MyPlace design system with new illustrations that would help the app feel more relational. We also included several new features that we discussed in our ideation phase:


  • Progress bar

  • Step-by-step group creation guide

  • New illustrations

  • Ability to set group guidelines

  • Create onboarding questions for new members