When Is Everyone?

Designing a mobile app that takes the stress out of getting together with friends.

Company

Role

Lead Designer

Timeline

1 month

The Problem

Let’s say you’ve just arrived at the restaurant you and your friends picked out for lunch. You walk in, take a quick look around, and realize no one else is there. Where is everyone?

You planned this a couple weeks ago, so hopefully everyone is still coming. Should you grab a table? Start calling people? Send a few texts and hope someone responds?

You could, but now you’re standing awkwardly next to the host juggling half a dozen conversations just to answer a pretty simple question: when is everyone getting here?

Different messaging apps and conversations used to coordinate a meetup

When trying to wrangle a group of friends, there's no telling who will respond or how.

The inability to quickly find out if and when your friends are coming may sound like one of life’s smaller problems. But it’s one of those everyday annoyances that creates unnecessary anxiety and takes some of the fun out of getting together.

The Goal

I partnered with the founders of Woh! to see if we could make that experience easier.

We were a tiny team: a Product Director, iOS developer, web services developer, and a designer (that’s me!), all with full-time jobs. So from the beginning, we were pretty ruthless about scope. Whatever we designed needed to solve the core problem and be small enough that we could actually ship it.

The Core Insight

We started with user interviews, concept reviews, and a lot of whiteboarding to understand how people actually coordinated plans with friends.

One of our early ideas was to use maps and GPS to show where everyone was. It seemed like the obvious solution to “Where is everyone?”

Research pointed us somewhere simpler.

People didn’t really need to know where their friends were. They wanted to know if they were coming and when they’d arrive.

Comparison of map-based location tracking and ETA-based arrival information

When mattered more to our users than where.

That distinction became the cornerstone of the product and gave us an unofficial motto: When Your Friends Are.

More importantly, it gave us a much tighter MVP. We focused on three things:

Creating an event and inviting friends
Accepting or declining an invitation
Seeing when everyone was expected to arrive

Everything else could wait.

Aiming for Effortless

We knew we were competing with something people already understood: sending a text.

If creating an event in Woh! felt like work, people weren’t going to bother. So I designed the experience around a small number of focused views and tried to remove as much friction as possible.

Creating an Event

Creating an event came down to the essentials: give it a name, choose a location and time, invite some friends, and optionally add a note.

In our testing, a typical event could be created in under 30 seconds.

We focused on making event creation as fast as possible.

Making RSVPs Almost Frictionless

Invitations had the same constraint. Rather than forcing people into an event just to respond, we designed a quick RSVP control directly into the events list.

The RSVP control made it quick to respond to an invitation directly from the events list.

Turning the Event Into an ETA Board

The event page was where the core idea really came together.

Before an event, the attendee list worked like a traditional RSVP list. You could quickly see who was planning to come.

Thirty minutes before the event, its job changed. The app began calculating ETAs for everyone who had accepted, and the list updated in real time as people got closer. Once someone entered a geofence around the destination, they were marked as arrived.

The ETA board served as both an RSVP list and a quick way to see when friends would arrive.

Instead of repeatedly texting everyone for updates, you could open one screen and answer the question that started the whole project: when is everyone getting here?

Testing and Building

We built a simple interactive prototype and tested it with friends and family, using what we learned to refine the experience before development.

Once the interaction model was solid enough, I shifted into visual design and created a lightweight design system with typography, color, reusable UI components, and specifications our developer could build from.

Woh visual design system and style guide

The style guide became an important communication tool as we moved into development.

Redline specs helped make the implementation details explicit for our developer.

I also wanted the product to feel like getting together with friends, not another scheduling utility.

I created a set of characters we called pinions, based loosely on map pins. They gave us a playful way to communicate the idea of people gathering together and became a recognizable part of the product’s identity.

Woh pinion characters illustrating friends arriving at an event

Pinions gave us a simple way to tell stories, like this explanation of how the ETA board worked.

We carried them into the product itself, including onboarding.

Woh onboarding screens using pinion characters

Pinions helped make onboarding feel a little more fun and a little less arduous.

Shipping Woh!

We shipped the app and started getting it into the hands of real users.

The finished app brought the interaction model and visual identity together.

Because we were a tiny team, my role extended beyond the app itself. I also designed and built a responsive marketing site to help explain the idea and drive downloads.

I designed and built a responsive marketing site to help introduce Woh! and drive app downloads.

The team presented Woh! several times at Switchyards, a startup hub in Atlanta, where we received encouraging feedback from early users and the startup community.

For a side project built by four people around full-time jobs, simply getting from an idea on a whiteboard to a real product in people’s hands was a meaningful outcome.

Epilogue

Woh! didn’t become the next big social app.

Over time, our little team got busier, people moved across the country, and we had less and less time to give the product the attention it needed. Rather than leave an unsupported app limping along, we eventually removed it from the App Store.

It wasn’t the lifespan we’d imagined when we started, but I’m still glad we built it.

Woh! gave me the opportunity to work across nearly the entire lifecycle of a product: understanding a problem, narrowing an MVP, testing ideas, designing the interaction and brand, supporting development, shipping, and helping tell the story afterward.

More importantly, it reinforced something I’ve carried into much larger products since: finding the smaller problem people actually need solved is often more valuable than building the more impressive solution.