FriendUp is a social wellbeing app designed for international students to overcome the challenges they face in maintaining friendships in a new environment. Through comprehensive research and official interviews, we identified real-world problems international students encounter when making and sustaining meaningful relationships.
The research revealed five main concepts: difficulties in keeping friends, worries about trust and privacy, sense of loneliness, the impact of academic and professional demands on social life, and the significance of food and hobbies in forming relationships.
Students face significant challenges in sustaining meaningful friendships beyond classroom interactions. While most students can initiate conversations during class or projects, these relationships often fade due to tight schedules or social anxiety.
Mei-Lin, a 27-year-old international student pursuing her Master's degree in Archive Communication in Sydney, represents our target user. She spends days studying alone or attending small seminars in formal settings. While she wants to make friends, she is concerned about safety and privacy and lacks confidence in starting and maintaining conversations.
Mei-Lin's daily life reflects the challenges our research uncovered. During group discussions, she becomes quiet, worried about saying the wrong thing or not being understood, especially on unfamiliar topics. After such encounters, she returns home feeling drained, replaying conversations and wishing she could connect more easily.
Evenings feel exceptionally long as she scrolls through Instagram seeing others with lively social lives while isolated in her room. Being away from family with no friends to share moments with, she feels emotionally hurt and disconnected. Over time, this pattern has led to anxiety and loss of motivation to join social activities.
What Mei-Lin lacks is not opportunity but confidence and safe space for interaction. She needs gentle, gradual ways to meet people who share her interests such as cooking or language exchange, with low social pressure and privacy protection.
One evening, Mei-Lin receives a notification from FriendUp about a new virtual cooking event. The app shows clear event details, safety ratings, and participant profiles, helping her feel confident to join.
Before joining, Mei-Lin selects her avatar "Luna" to represent herself in the session. Using the avatar makes her feel relaxed because she can participate without showing her real identity at first. During the cooking class, she follows instructions, chats with other participants, and gradually becomes comfortable interacting online. By the end, she exchanges friendly messages with others.
After joining more activities through the app, Mei-Lin gains confidence and becomes more active socially. Eventually, she joins an in-person tennis event as herself instead of using the avatar. She feels proud of this growth and plans to organize her own event through FriendUp to help other students connect.
The storyboard illustrates Mei-Lin's journey from isolation to connection through FriendUp, showing how the app facilitates gradual confidence building through avatar-based virtual interactions leading to real-world connections.
FriendUp promotes sociability that extends beyond simply "meeting new people." It emphasizes meaningful relationships through:
The design ultimately enables international students to create and sustain friendships that respect their time, privacy, and individuality in a friendly and encouraging way.
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