Mobile app
Team-up: Connecting Student Entrepreneurs with Same Minds
📖 Overview:
Team-up is a student-focused collaboration app designed to help university founders find the right partners to kick-off their entrepreneurial ideas. By supporting structured matching, trust-building profiles, and community engagement, the app helps students gain confidence to start, build stronger teams, and reduce the number of ideas abandoned before they begin.
📒 Problem:
University students are eager to build startups but get stuck working alone. Teams can’t find members, individuals can’t find teams, and early ideas die without peer support—because there’s no effective way to connect the right students at the right time.
💻 Research
Research current users:
In order to better understand the problem, I conducted interviews with a number of students and proposed 3 types of personas based on their different focus of pains and needs:
Persona 1: Team Builder
Persona 2: Team Seeker
Persona 3: Idea Explorer
✍️ Reframe the Problem
Current solutions (Slack, Co-founder Apps, Social Events) are designed for execution, not exploration. They completely ignores the "incubation" phase where most students actually reside and this group(idea explorer)'s problems are currently underserved:
🤔 How Might We…
How might we leverage the university network to connect students exploring vague ideas with like-minded peers efficiently and foster the collective confidence needed to prevent early-stage burnout and idea abandonment?
🎯 Solution
The proposed solution is a mobile app requiring mandatory university log-ins that combines interest-based peer matching, collection of social events with information about attendees group and online community forum for early-stage entrepreneurs.
🎨 Design Highlights
Structure the search for collaborators: on-boarding process + compatibility filters
The onboarding process is strategically designed to capture four critical dimensions of collaboration: intent, interests, network and skill gap. This guided reflection transforms a vague desire for "connecting with someone" into a structured search for a partner, providing the clarity and collective confidence needed to move an idea forward.
Upon completing the onboarding, users receive a curated feed of profiles. To ensure the discovery process remains flexible, I integrated filters that allow users to refine their criteria and refresh their results.
👆
Using different filters to refresh the search
Improve network transparency & efficiency: demographic insights of events
In the Event feature where entrepreneurial events are collected and listed, users get to know insights of demographic information of potential attendees (users can RSVP any events) allowing them to evaluate the community fit before they arrive.
The event also lists potential attendees' clickable profiles to help ensure that every event could be an opportunity for intentional collaboration rather than random chance by bridging the gap between digital profiles and physical meetups,
Create opportunity for context-driven conversation: online forum
The Hub redefines networking by shifting the focus from "cold outreach" to "content-based connection".
"Meet new members" allow new-created profiles to get a "warm start" and immediate visibility;
"Share my ideas" allow users to post unpolished connected to get constructive feedback;
"Poll & Survey" provides a feed for suers to distribute surveys and market research;
"Q&A&Resources" is a collective library for asking and sharing any tips and resources.
💡 Reflection
Narrow-mindness & bias in design choices:
Unlike my previous projects, I am the only researcher and designer for this one. This independence has its advantages, such as allowing me to stay focused, working efficiently in some sense and ensuring consistency in the design of the product. However, the biggest drawback is the potential for narrow-mindedness and bias in my design choices.
As a potential user of the product myself, I may inadvertently inject too much of my own perspective and feelings into the design, overlooking the needs and preferences of other users. There are moments when I really love my design while the testers expressed different perspectives. For example, in my design for users to check on attendees’ demographic information, one tester mentioned that this actually made her feel excluded because what if she does not fit into the specified categories.
This feedback was crucial and made me realize that my perspective as a designer and potential user may lead to assumptions that could not resonate with other users and therefore, the importance of seeking diverse feedback and remaining open to different viewpoints throughout the design process.