A conceptual app intended to help people achieve quality over quantity in their relationships.
PROJECT: Conceptual Social App
DURATION: 8 Weeks
SKILLS: Interface design, prototyping, design systems, research
the challenge
U.S. young adults are facing a loneliness epidemic
Social technology promises to connect us, yet the more time we spend with it, the lonelier we feel.² Our devices, while undeniably powerful and convenient, interfere with fundamental social connections that make us human.
How might we design a product that reinforces strong social connections by helping us balance the ways we interact, tracking both the quality and quantity of our relationships, to foster more meaningful, lasting human connections and support our "social health"?
the outcome
GiGi reconnects people with what matters most: real world social connection
GiGi listens to user inputs regarding social tendencies, preferences, and goals to interpret their daily social interactions and understand how they compile and compare to their desired areas of social connection. Long-term data tracking visualizes social health, notifies the user when it is unbalanced, and recommends ways to reach out to others.
rethinking systems
A system created to categorize and analyze social connection
We live in an extraordinary time with an abundance of methods to connect with the people we care about. Utilizing Garmin's system to track physical fitness and terminology highlighted by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, GiGi operates using a system to help users define, categorize, and analyze the social interactions they have.
data visualization
Tracking data over time and visualizing it help the user identify trends
Long-term data tracking allows users to visualize and identify trends in their social behavior, providing them with the knowledge and awareness to know when too much digital connection is affecting their real world relationships.
recommendations & insights
Identify imbalances in recent social behavior and recommend strategies to improve
The goal of this app is to encourage individuals to connect better with the important people in their lives and not to rely overly on digital mediums to accomplish their socializing. If it detects that you're relying too heavily on virtual connections to fulfill your daily requirements, it will recommend methods and contacts you can reach out to in order to rebalance your social focus.
contact profiles
Recognize your social habits with different contacts and identify areas you'd like to improve in
By giving each contact a breakdown of social interaction tiers, the user can understand how their daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly habits of socializing disperse amongst people they try to stay in touch with. GiGi introduces the idea of "social circles," giving a user a breakdown of where contacts reside based on the level of social connection maintained with them.
dive deeper
time with friends
Adolescents are on average spending less daily time with friends
Surveys like Figure 1 show that unstructured time with friends plummeted from 2010–2015 as teens thought they weren't necessarily losing time with their friends; they were just moving the friendships from real life to online.¹ However, recent studies have shown that too much time on social media displaces more meaningful social interactions, whereas too little time on social media cannot meet an individual’s need to foster and maintain relationships.⁴
Figure 1. The percentage of U.S. student who agreed or mostly agreed with the statement “I usually have a few friends around that I can get together with.” Rates dropped slowly before 2012, and more quickly afterward. (Source: Monitoring the Future.)
Figure 2. Daily average time spent with friends in minutes. Only the youngest age group shows a sharp drop before the 2020 data collection, which was performed after COVID restrictions had begun. (Source: American Time Use Study.)
number of friends
Adolescents have fewer and fewer close friends to spend time with
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to the introduction and widespread adoption of smartphones, social media, video games, and high-speed wireless internet between 2010–2015 as "the great rewiring," a period where a generation of children moved away from the real world into the virtual.¹ With the great migration onto smartphones in the early 2010, girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties.¹ As shown in Figure 2, this explosive growth caused a decline in the number and depth of close friendships.¹ Or in other words, quality beats quantity when it comes to our relationships.
loneliness
The U.S. has undergone a major shift in relationships and the youngest generations are the most affected
In a 2023 report, the U.S. Surgeon General found that the highest rates of loneliness are observed among young adults aged 18–29, with 1 in every 3 young adults reporting feelings of loneliness.² Figure 3 shows a dramatic increase in feelings of loneliness in U.S. adolescents during this time, with a continued upward trend afterwards.
Wouldn't it be an odd coincidence if the number of close friendships and time spent with friends decreased during the same period when feelings of loneliness in adolescents dramatically increased and it was all during the worldwide adoption of smartphones and social media?
Figure 3. Percent of U.S. students (8th, 10th, 12th grade) who agreed or mostly agreed with the statement “A lot of times I feel lonely.” (Source: Monitoring the Future)
Okay, we get it. Phones are bad and make people lonely. What are you going to do about it?
Well... I have an idea. What if we tracked our social health similar to how we track our physical health?
rethinking the system
A 1:1 conversion with Garmin's system for physical fitness
I took the categories of anaerobic, aerobic, and high aerobic physical activity and converted them into social health equivalents, capturing varying levels of intensity regarding social interaction.
light social
Effective but brief and overly abundant
Light social interactions are asynchronous and commonly disembodied ways of communicating with people that are beneficial for short-term connection. They are primarily virtual touchpoints that include texting/DMs and social media activity.
deep social
Powerful and severly underutilized
Deep social interactions are synchronous, sometimes embodied ways of communicating with people that are beneficial for both short-term and long-term connections. They can be phone calls, video calls, or brief in-person conversations involving one-to-one or one-to-many interactions.
core social
The most important connections we can make
Core social interactions are embodied, synchronous, and beneficial for long-term connection. They are in-person conversations involving conflict resolution, vulnerable sharing, and caregiving conversations.
terminology
I created a system with which to define the interactions we have throughout the day
Borrowing some terms defined by Jonathan Haidt, I defined my three categories of social interaction based on where they lie on a scale of entirely virtual interaction to fully in-person conversation. There are a myriad of ways in which we connect with people, but not all of them yield the same desired results that they're promised.
if i had more time
Social health, connection, and an individual's preference for adequate contact with other humans is highly subjective
- When beginning my research and design work for this project, I had a very limited user persona in mind: myself, my siblings, and the friends and family members I've interacted with for my entire life. I would like to collect data from young adults to understand how the research I've conducted matches with the lives of the people I've observed.
- A huge limitation when working on this project was a lack of time to conduct interviews with people to understand their issues with maintaining relationships in their lives and how digital technologies affect that process.
- I would have loved to have completed usability testing on my prototype to see how people interpreted the interfaces after the brief education portion of the onboarding process and getting them familiar with the system I've created.
- It would be nice to create a higher fidelity prototype at some point. For now, the app exists only as static screens, but I have plans to make it fully interactive to give a sense of what experiencing the product would be like.
how did ai assist?
ChatGPT helped solidify and ideate on initial ideas and conceptualize the framework. Lovable helped visualize the skeleton
Working back and forth with ChatGPT helped me nail down my initial interaction framework and put into words the ideas that were floating in my head. From there, I dove into specificity and fixed up some of the language and categorizing that was far too generic and lacked authenticity.
When creating the UI, I had already started by translating Garmin's design system into my own, copying their layout, features, and functionality while translating them into social health language and terminology. Lovable helped me to generate some lingering screens that I wasn't able to visualize easily, such as the tracking screen.
sources
References
- Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024.
- Murthy, Vivek H. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2023.
- Roberts, J. A., Young, P. D., and David, M. E. "The Epidemic of Loneliness: A 9-Year Longitudinal Study of the Impact of Passive and Active Social Media Use on Loneliness." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241295870.
- Zhang, Libing et al. “Social Networking Site Use and Loneliness: A Meta-Analysis.” The Journal of psychology vol. 156,7 (2022): 492-511. doi:10.1080/00223980.2022.2101420.
info
I’m a multidisciplinary product designer passionate about crafting meaningful experiences that help people thrive.
I am currently looking for a full-time, on-site role in Boston!
peter loughlin
product experience designer
contact
pwtloughlin@gmail.com
781-910-7888
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