A simple web-based app that will allow users to easily invite friends to social gatherings, communicate details, and keep track of attendees.
It has always been difficult to plan and organise social events with groups of friends. For any individual who likes organising social gatherings with a relatively large number of attendees (5+ attendees) on a regular basis, the process of inviting, confirming attendance, communicating event details, and assigning help/tasks to attendees is disjointed and ‘messy’.
After our user research, we learned that the journey of organising social events has 4 parts, each coming with their own set of pain points:
Event planning pain points:
Event creation pain points:
Event delivery looks like:
Post event looks like:
Research indicated that there were two core pain points from the list above that were true for every social event that is ever organized.
We knew we wanted to work on features that address the two main pain points above since they would solve pain points that arise in every single social event organization scenario.
Solution summary: A web based interface that allows an event organizer to create a social event, invite attendees, and track RSVPs in real time. We will have an event creation function and will allow users to create and event page and send invites to attendees via a shareable ‘join’ link. Attendees will be able to add the event details to their personal calendars and can access the event page via this calendar ‘invite’.
Feature list:
Figma Link to Lofi and Hifi mockups
After speaking with users, we realised our initial MVP scope did not allow users to re-access the web based event page if they lost the unique URL link. We decided that we would require users to provide their emails when using the web app so that we could send event details (including the link to the event webpage) directly to users inboxes. This is similar to the workflow of how apps like Calendly send confirmation emails with meeting details to the users inbox after meetings have been booked.
Socialite’s front-end is hosted on Netlify and its back-end is hosted on Heroku. Our tech-stack includes a front-end React framework, a cloud-host firebase database as well as a server hosted on Heroku to handle the sending of emails to users/clients.
Our biggest technical challenge was the implementation of a virtual server. We had experience in building front-end applications, with cloud-based databases. However, we had never built a server from the ground-up. This was necessary in order to implement our email sending feature to clients/users.
We will not be continuing with the project however, we expect to be able to use the web app amongst our own friend groups to organise social gatherings.