GoFriends Travel buddy flow

Commissioned by design agency Fabrique and Mojo Concerts, GoFriends is an app that helps potential Lowlands festival visitors get in touch with each other through a matching system that solves the biggest showstoppers most of our target audience run into.

More about the process:

GoFriends is an app that matches people that want to go to the Lowlands festival with each other. Solving transport issues along the way. Users are matched based on their music preferences, travel situation and buddy preferences. Through a chat they can stay in touch. We also added features to use during the three-day festival: Who’s Awake, which helps users find others on the camping grounds who are not done partying during the nights. And a function to save your tent location for future reference, in case you get a bit more than tipsy.

For Lowlands
This project was a request from design agency Fabrique and Mojo for Lowlands, a festival in the Netherlands. They realized that people are only thinking about Lowlands in the festival season, and they'd prefer their visitors to be engaged throughout the entire year. So they asked us, design students, for a solution that would engage people with Lowlands, before, during as well as after the festival.

Findings
After desk research on Lowlands and making a competitors analysis, I realized that a big part of the Lowlands experience is the community itself. It’s forming and enjoying friendships over something that visitors have in common: the love for music. That is how we got to the idea of a social platform.

During interviews with the target audience, my team and I discovered a big problem, preventing many people from truly going to the festival: a lack of transport or company.

Concepting
During the concepting stage, my team and I couldn’t settle on one idea to work with, so I suggested to split the team up into three couples for a week. During this time, each couple would work out a concept of their own, to eventually present the idea with a poster and a pitch to the team and to the target audience. It led to competitiveness, which boosted the team's productivity and quality significantly.

My partner and I decided to build on the problems that we had discovered earlier, and build a social network around solving those problems. After pitching the three concepts to the target audience, it was clear which idea fitted their needs most. The target audience had been given means to solve their problems, and therefore a reason to use the application. This is how my team and I got to an app called GoFriends.

Iterations
After we had listed all the functionalities and criteria, I worked out a flowchart that my team members converted into the first version of GoFriend’s wireframe and prototype.

I had arranged multiple testing sessions, to find out what areas could be improved and then reported back to the team. I joined the wireframing team to work out a final version, and we created a first visual design. After testing it with the target audience, I re-designed it once more, with their feedback in mind, which was well received.