Honeycomb
A mobile-friendly, user-sourced website to help you find your new third place.
Time Frame
Two Business Weeks
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July 2022
Task Background
Crafted a mobile-first responsive website prototype to help students, workers, and all-around cool people find places that fit their vibe and budget as a spec project.
Deliverables
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High-fidelity prototype
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Project report
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Presentation to peers
My Primary Roles
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User Researcher
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Feature Designer
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Desktop High-Fidelity Prototype Designer
Project Overview
Browse local venues listed and rated by other Honeycomb users for work, food, and hanging out based on your filter search history and followed spaces.
Site Features
Content Feed (Followed, Friends & Algorithmic Content)
User-Aggregated Business Information
Map Search & Filters | User Reviews | User Profiles | Store Profiles
Inspiration From Frustration
Honeycomb emerged from a common frustration within our design team: Where do we do our homework for free? When completing my last project, I personally found myself competing for space at Bryant Park, where the Wi-Fi was iffy, and the grass was packed because a movie night was planned. And what if the "vibes" are "off," as some would describe it?
Helping Busy Bees
Interviews with remotely-working students and freelancers affirmed our assumptions that poorer and marginalized students and remote workers want to to inhabit places that make them comfortable. More importantly, they trust others like themselves to know what and where those are.
As a form of business analysis, we looked deeper into sites like Yelp and Google Maps to see what they lacked. After the interviewing, we also looked into sites mentioned by users, such as TikTok and Instagram, that don't provide the user-tailored recommendations that social media often pushes to these audiences using local algorithmic targeting.
In our assigned context of an app regarding social impact, we realized that despite an influx in searching apps, it's harder than ever to find a place to do work or socialize in a place that fits everyone's needs, especially those that don't fit a traditional white-collar image of a "cafe dweller."
We took our own experiences and those of our interviewees and essentially vented our sadness about the on-the-go cafe-finding experience through our User Journey:
In this process, were able to affirm our initial frustrations, combine them with the interview insights and challenge ourselves to help people looking for a third place to work, outside of their office/home, find a trustworthy and reliable workspace.
Building A Place for Third Places
With the student/freelancer persona and user journey in mind, we built out features that let users find a place to work, study, eat, drink, or just hang out within their constraints:
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Discovery Feed, allowing users to follow friends and venues, or have them recommended based on history.
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User Profile, where users can keep track of where they (and others) have been and enjoyed.
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Map with preference filters, to find new places on the fly, and see where users and followed users have gone.
Cross-Pollinating Influence
We found our biggest challenge was creating a balance between Honeycomb's primary goals of venue-finding and incentivizing social media-like exploration. Interestingly, as mentioned prior, many interviewees said they found recommendations off social media apps such as Instagram and Tik Tok.
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Therefore, we took influence from other social media apps in order to make Honeycomb feel more like a community. As a mobile-first responsive website, Honeycomb lets users find places to go on the fly. It allows filtering for places other followed users have been, as well as bookmarking certain locations for future reference.
Homepage Sweet Homepage
I was responsible for designing and finalizing Honeycomb's desktop edition, which aims to allow more free-form exploration of the venues recommended by Honeycomb without limiting its powerful focused search features.
For instance, the "Suggestions" feature, which is normally folded into its own menu on the mobile app, expands on the side. The store page's information is also more present, expanding to the width of the screen, so users can do more research into their potential destination.
Desktop Prototype
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Team/Workplace
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Group facilitation
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Consensus activities
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Design/concept convergence
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Task prioritization
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Time management
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Report drafting
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Presentation construction
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Public speaking
Design
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User interviewing
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Business analysis
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Personas & user journeys
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Design studio
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Design sketching (paper & whiteboard)
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Site mapping
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Iterative design
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Mockup design
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Prototype construction
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User testing
Tools
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Figma
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Google Drive Suite
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Keynote
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Zoom
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Slack