We started out the design process by researching and interviewing people to ask them questions and learn about people's social experience currently. Through this, we were able to gather enough data to understand how we wanted to go about a new social media platform. We wanted to make an app where people can meet online in a more human interaction. We came up with a few ideas and selected our favorite one. This was the first round of prototyping giving us a social platform using Discord to learn about different interactions based on the usage of cameras, microphones, or purely text.
Learning that people communicate better in a face to face format, we wanted to move into that platform while also incorporating Geo-location technology to get people to meet people in the same area as them to be able to meet up in the future. That leads into our second prototype that acted as a server for people in close areas to meet with a function to have a camera on for a face to face interaction.
This final prototype was developed using all of the information we had learned over the two prototyping sessions and made some tweaks to the 2nd iteration for our finalized application. Each prototype leaned to use real world usage.
In the above images, we see the first two iterations of our platform throughout the first two prototyping sessions. As stated before, the purpose of these two wasn't necessarily to test our product, but rather to test the interactions and preferences of people in a "classroom" environment.