Buckets
A friendship making app that helps you meet people who want to do the same things.
Have you ever found it difficult to make friends in your area?
Our research and own experiences helped to shape our problem statement:
Introducing Buckets
Buckets is a social app designed to help young adults form meaningful friendships by turning shared bucket list items into real-world experiences. Unlike traditional friendship apps that often feel transactional or one-time, Buckets encourages ongoing group activities where connections can grow over time.
Start your Buckets journey by making a new listing for something you want to do.
Set details like activity, location, and time.
Now other users can explore and request to join your listing
Now you can accept new friends and start planning your meet up!
Research Insights
To understand the challenges of making friends as an adult, we conducted user interviews and synthesized findings into key themes. Our research focused on young adults in New York City navigating transitional life stages, where building new social connections is a high priority.
Target Audience
Digitally fluent young adults, ages 18–35, living in NYC. This group is socially active, often moving for work or school, and values meaningful friendships that provide emotional support. We chose NYC for its fast-paced culture that can feel isolating despite population density.
Interview Findings
- Strong friendships require repetitive contact and maintenance.
- Participants prefer meeting new people in small group settings.
- Shared identity and interests help build trust and comfort.
- Trying new activities makes first-time meetups less awkward.
- Users struggle to initiate conversations without mutual context.
Design Process
Our design journey moved from rough sketches and ideation to high-fidelity mockups and user testing. Each step was informed by feedback from potential users.
Our initial paper sketches helped us visualize user flows and brainstorm ideas, focusing on how users could easily discover and maintain meaningful friendships. These rough drawings guided early design decisions and highlighted opportunities.
We explored multiple concepts: from memory scrapbooks to duo apps, eventually converging on the shared bucket list model.
Low-fidelity wireframes helped us test basic flows for onboarding, creating a listing, and exploring activities.
Mid-fidelity screens allowed us to refine navigation, clarify group activity flows, and iterate on the Explore experience based on user feedback.
Through 7 usability tests, we learned users wanted clearer onboarding, more context in Explore, and an easier way to manage requests.
High-fidelity mockups brought our vision to life, showcasing polished UI, vibrant colors, and intuitive interactions. These screens helped us validate final design choices and communicate the app’s experience to users.
Branding & Visual Design
To unify Buckets’ identity across the app, we created a cohesive visual system including colors, typography, reusable components, and design tokens. The goal was to balance energy and approachability — reflecting the excitement of trying new things while remaining welcoming and accessible.
We defined a palette of energetic colors, playful gradients, and rounded shapes to evoke warmth and approachability. Typography and iconography were chosen for clarity and friendliness, supporting a consistent brand experience across screens.
UI Kit with primary colors (Sanga Red, Golden Yellow, Cyan Blue), typography guidelines (Poppins), spacing rules that we transformed into reuseable design tokens in Figma.
Reusable UI components like buttons, input fields, and cards were designed for consistency and scalability. These elements ensure a unified look and feel throughout the app, making it easy to maintain and extend the design system as new features are added.
High-Fidelity Wireframes
Building on our research and iterative design process, we created high-fidelity wireframes to validate visual decisions and prepare for usability testing. These flows demonstrate how users discover, join, and complete bucket list activities with friends.
Onboarding flow with app purpose
Minimal profile highlighting interests & joined activities
Explore page showing activity cards with interest + attendees
Creating a new bucket list activity by setting details, or using prompts for inspiration.
Manage your bucket list activities, view requests, and accept new friends to join your group.
Chat feature for planning meetups and staying connected with new friends.
Impact & Learnings
Usability testing revealed the importance of clear app purpose, and easy onboarding. Meaningful connections are hard to build, even for people who are open to friendship. While friendship means different things to different people, we found that continuous in-person experiences over time are the most common path to lasting connections.
Next steps include more features to support maintaining friendships like a shared memories feature and smart notifications to continue meeting up
