Cheers! to friendship. More Social, Less Media.
A passion project turned start-up by co-founder Braxton Madison and myself. We met as fellow students at Georgia Tech both with a desire to build a digital social space that provided the tools to forge deeper friendships. Dissatisfied by the current social media options, we design, developed, and launched a platform that would connect people with their communities and help them capture the memories for future reflection. I designed and prototyped using Figma while Braxton developed in Swift for iOS.
We founded the B corporation Cheers Social Co. and successfully launched on the iOS AppStore for public download in December 2020.
Over the course of our 2-year development, Cheers! was:
The development of Cheers! centered on the ethical treatment of our users at the core of our product. We strove to create a social media platform that would enhance and deepen our relationships- not replace them.
Much of the design processes involved interviewing users in person and reviewing research to identity the positive aspects of social media and enhancing those in Cheers! while we minimized the negative characteristics. I continued developing Cheers! throughout my graduate studies, so my research included discussions of social media ethics or design interventions aimed at enhancing user agency. Both studies played a large role in the design and development of our product.
An element of this research was apparent in the choice to opt out of public facing walls and message boards in favor of private, personal Friendlines between users where they would post images and comments.
Some of my favorite features of Cheers! focused on BJ Fogg's model for behavioral change. His research describes how motivation for someone to change their behavior isn't enough if it's not sparked by a well-timed trigger to act. We integrated this into our design process by nudging our users to send someone a birthday message or follow up on a new connection using the Experiences flow to plan an offline interaction. While participating in an Experience, Cheers! may nudge users one again to capture the memory with a photo to later share on a private Friendline. Forgetting to take a photo together while spending time with friends was a common response during our discussions with social media users.
Another one of my personal favorite features of Cheers! were the Bucket Lists integrated in each Friendline. This was a shared space to dream and create loose plans or goals together to do later. Then these Bucket List items could be easily converted in an Experience once it was ready to shift from idea to action!
