Where coffee sparks meaningful connections

espressoh! is a social networking app designed for young professionals, graduate students, and career changers in NYC who are seeking support and meaningful connections.

By facilitating genuine, in-person coffee meetups, espressoh! fosters authentic relationships and builds a supportive community, eliminating impersonal cold messaging and promoting lasting bonds.

Branding

My Role

Product Design

Team

1 UX Research

3 Product Designers (me)

User Testing

Design system

Duration

15 Weeks

Challenge

Newcomers to NYC, especially young professionals, grad students, and career changers, often struggle to build meaningful relationships that support their social and professional growth, as most social platforms prioritize surface-level interaction over real-world connections.

Discover

Survey Responses

User Interviews

Insights Identified

Our Goals

We saw an opportunity to connect NYC’s vibrant coffee scene with the evolving needs of seeking meaningful and lasting relationships.

Our goal was to build a fun and supportive platform that encourages offline meetups and nurtures more casual, authentic connections with these core objectives:

Learn, Iterate, Improve

Throughout the project, we worked closely with potential users and the product team to test our solutions for usability and usefulness.

We drew from key insights gathered through user testing sessions to continuously improve upon our designs. After multiple rounds of iteration and fine-tuning, we arrived at a solution that truly resonates with the needs of our users, bringing best-in-class app design standards to fulfill their needs.

Progress

Tackling Redemption Confusion

We removed the leveling-up system to avoid having two in-app currencies (XP and Bean Bucks) and relabeled the main CTA buttons for better clarity.

Users were confused by the language used on the rewards page, and some struggled to find key information.

Improving HomePage Layout

We prioritized upcoming meetups and reorganized the cafe discovery section to improve navigation and overall user flow.

Content layout does not match with users mental model and expectations.

espressoh! is a platform designed to help young professionals, graduate students, and career changers grow their social and professional networks in a more casual, authentic way.

Impactful Designs

Swipe on cafes you like, connect and mingle with like-minded people in your field through shared cafe preferences. Turning digital matches into real-world meetups.

Discover and connect

No more awkward small talk. Your AI virtual host makes it easy to kick off real conversations.

Break the ice with the AI virtual host

Stay motivated to nurture your connections by earning Bean Bucks. Collect rewards by following up, hitting a new cafe, and more.

Maintain connections and earn rewards

Takeaways

This project gave me the opportunity to practice designing with both user needs and business goals in mind. I refined my ability to create intuitive and delightful interactions while ensuring that the product remained feasible and valuable for the networking context. I experimented with gamified features and reward systems, exploring how small design choices can encourage real-world connections and sustained engagement, setting the product apart from other social networking apps in the market.

In the end, I was able to deliver a unique yet feasible app that not only supports meaningful in-person networking but also creates value for partner businesses through a mutually beneficial reward system. The most rewarding part was building a consistent visual system and component library, which allowed me to apply branding strategy to product design thinking and ensure scalability across future features.

Previous
Previous

Amazon Capsule – Reimagining the future of music streaming

Next
Next

PowerFlex – Supporting lifters to train smarter and stay motivated