Designing an app to find happy hours and invite friends
CalArts UX/UI Design Specialty
'Happy Place' is a one-stop happy hour finder that connects with your friends to get from planning to party as quickly as possible.
View Prototype
'Happy Place' is a one-stop happy hour finder that connects with your friends to get from planning to party as quickly as possible.
View Prototype
Where do you want to get drinks after work? This is a question that often requires too much work to answer - opening Google Maps, hoping the bars you've favorited have a happy hour going on (or searching "Happy Hour"), coming up with options to text your group chat, texting your group chat, and waiting and hoping.
'Happy Place' is an app designed to solve this problem. It is a one-stop happy hour finder that connects with your friends to get from planning to party as quickly as possible.
This project took place over two months in late 2019 as part of my CalArts UI/UX design specialization.
Google Maps is the primary answer to the question "How do you choose where to drink?" It offers lots of data on various bars and restaurants, including hours, photos, reviews, and menus. It's is not always reliable when it comes to happy hours though, often featuring outdated deals (if any at all). Some of the more specialized apps, like The Happy Hour App and BarHopper are limited to certain cities, don't let you search by proximity using a map, and don't connect with your friends.
In informal tests, users typically spent between 10 and 15 minutes finding a same-day happy hour near them, then creating a group chat to invite people out. Typical solutions that popped up were Google Maps, Apple Maps, Untappd, Foursquare - and more than once, calling bars on the phone to ask about deals. Planning for a future happy hour took even longer, as deals vary day-to-day, and no existing solution allows you to filter by day of the week.
A small survey of bartenders also revealed that many owners are looking for a consistent and reliable place to advertise happy hour deals - most don't update their Google Maps profile (since it is an inconsistent place for people to search for happy hours), and window/sidewalk advertisements only work for people who happen to be walking by and looking for a happy hour. These people are typically regulars anyway.
A- Simplify the process of finding happy hours. It should be easy to find bars/restaurants open right now that have happy hours, or to plan a happy hour in the future (top two use cases).
B- Allow users to filter at any time by beer, cocktail, or food deals, as well as happy hours going on right now
C- Make it easy to invite friends through social network integration and creating a quick and easy flow for creating invites
Brendan is a new employee at a startup in Manhattan. He has recently moved to town from south central Wisconsin (go Badgers!), and is not familiar with the city, but he still wants to invite his new co-workers out for drinks to introduce himself. He does not know anything about the Manhattan bar scene, and still wants to be budget-conscious, so he really wants to find a good happy hour nearby. He's narrowed the search down to some cool places using Google Maps, but it's not helpful with happy hour deals. He searches the app store for dedicated apps, but only finds apps that cater to San Jose, or don't let you specify a neighborhood, or let you focus on "beer" deals.
Finally he comes across Happy Place, which quickly lets him filter his search by "beer", and his East Village location. It even highlights his favorites from his Google search; and thanks to the Slack integration, easily lets him invite his team out for drinks tonight. Success!
The team is really impressed with how quickly he was able to find a cool happy hour in the city, and a lot of them ask about the Happy Place app that invited them to the happy hour.
Sharing a clickable prototype in an informal trial, users were able to click through the primary flow of the app in around 25 seconds. This compares favorably to the 10 or so minutes it took to accomplish similar tasks without the app. Users also intuitively discovered the filter function, and were able to invite a friend.
Users responded favorably to the intuitiveness of the primary flow, especially the filtering functions and the availability to invite friends. Some users were wary of connecting social networks to the app, and asked what it would look like when someone received an invitation from the app: would it be an email, or would it show up via the connected social network, or would it force people to download the app? Overall, people favored a lower-impact solution, such as an email with the relevant info and an RSVP button.
I was surprised to learn that there is no dedicated way for bars to advertise happy hours to an audience that is specifically looking for them, and thought that would be a great source of revenue and potential advertisement for the app itself. Need to research the best way to involve bar owners in the app, whether it is through a section of the app, a web API, or a dedicated app for bar owners. Good problems!
View the video of the prototype to the left, or click below to try it for yourself!
Try Clickable PrototyPe