Mobile LDR application
Long Distance Realtionship/Friendship Application
This project focused on designing To Be Together (TBT), an app aimed at helping students in long-distance relationships stay emotionally connected while balancing academics and social life. The goal was to create a digital space where couples could share meaningful moments, maintain rituals, and feel a sense of presence despite physical distance. By prioritizing emotional connection, seamless communication, and shared experiences, I designed TBTogether to foster deeper relationships through interactive features tailored to the unique challenges of long-distance love whether it be romantic or not.
Timeline
From explorations & research to final designs in 5-6 months
Problem
Students in long-distance relationships, romantic or non romantic often struggle to maintain meaningful connections while balancing academics and social lives. The physical distance and time differences can lead to feelings of loneliness, isolation and emotional disconnect, which can impact both their well-being and relationship satisfaction. Existing communication tools focus on real-time interaction but fail to address the need for sustained emotional engagement in an asynchronous manner. My objective was to build a solution that helps long distance relationships stay connected in a way that is flexible, personal and integrates into their daily routines.
Project Goals
To address these challenges, I established these goals:
1. Intuitive User Experience: Design a mobile application that seamlessly integrates into user’s busy lives
2. Interactive Features: Making sure to incorporate interactive features like customizing journal pages with items from shop, adding friends, and creating a personalized journal entry within the mobile application.
3. Making sure that our application fosters intentional communication who are separated from a distance.
4. Provide a unique and engaging communication method beyond texts and calls
This category details the step-by-step approach taken during this project, including research, planning, design, development, user testing and ideation phases.
Interviews & Affinity Diagramming
To understand the needs and challenges of users in long distance relationships, we conducted 5 detailed interviews with a range of users mainly students, who are in romantic long distance relationships as well as users who are in non-romantic long distance relationships making sure to understand their pain points and aspirtations. We analyzed responses using affinity diagramming to identify key painpoints, recurring themes and potential solutions.
Personas
Based on user research, we developed personas to represent different types of long distance relationships, including romantic partners, close friends, and family members. These personas helped us tailor features to address real user needs and ensure our solution was empathetic and user centric.
Wireframing & Prototyping
We created low fidelity wireframes to explore different interaction models and information hierarchies. As we refined the designs, we built interactive prototypes to test functinality and user flow. During mid-fidelity prototyping, we addressed early user feedback by enhancing customization options, refining navigation and introducing key features such as a challenge system with rewards, improved shop functionality and a more cohesive visual design
User Testing
I conducted usability tests to evaluate the effectiveness of the design. Users performed tasks such as posting journal entries, decorating entries with stickers, and customizing avatars. During mid-fidelity prototyping, we adressed early user feedback by enhancing customization options, refining nvaigation and introducing key features such as a challenge system with rewards, improved shop functionality, and a more cohesive visual design. We measured success rates, time to complete tasks and collected qualitative feedback
Findings from usability testing:
Users found navigation mostly intuitive but had trouble locating purchased stickers and using them in their journal entries
Many were unclear on how to share jounral entries or interact socially within the app.
The concept of challenges and earning coins for completing tasks needed further clarification.
Based on these findings, we iterated on the design by making social interactions clearer, improving sticker application workflows, and providing more explicit guidance for users
