Social media
Mobile app
Bloom Social
Designing “Event Posts”, an end-to-end concept for a social platform that fosters authentic connections
Paired through Develop for Good
Roles:
UX Designer
UI Designer
Team:
1 Product Manager
1 Design Manager
5 Designers
Tools:
Figma
FigJam
User Testing
Notion
Date:
May 2025 – Aug 2025
Timeline:
16 weeks
The Problem
ABOUT NENOS.INC
Mission: Amplify local voices & foster meaningful connections with Bloom Social, a non-algorithmic social media app
Purpose: Casual social media users now have a space that encourages them to be ‘Creators’ and be the ones forming the community
The Brief
Our Objective
Currently, there’s a missing portion to the app’s functionality. Users are only able to follow and find people from their contacts. Limited functionality = limited connections.
What does connection actually look like?
Our stakeholders at nenos Inc. gave us a clear but wide-open assignment: design Bloom Social’s Discover tab, from a blank state, and refine the app’s design system to enhance discoverability and boost community engagement.
Problem Statement
By doing so, we aim to focus our directions with this problem statement:
Research
Our first phase was to identify users’ social preferences, discovery habits, and motivations when searching for local events and communities to engage with.
01
Primary research
Surveys & Interviews
We distributed a survey and conducted interviews to learn what tools and apps users use for social discovery and what they are lacking
survey results
We discovered that:
When choosing whether to attend something, the top factors were location, cost, and who else was going
interview results
It already happened?
After the interviews, we synthesized the data with an affinity map and found 4 major themes across our target demographic’s experiences in discovering new local activities.
*Needing the right info to make a decision, prioritizing convenience, preference for content based on interests, opinions of others matter**
Secondary Research
What competitors are doing
competitor analysis
I audited four apps with similar bones: Mastodon and Nextdoor (deep community boards, text-first) and Instagram and S’more (broad discovery, but algorithmic)
None combined both: deep community structure and personalized, filterable discovery.
Brainstorming
What’s happening near me?
The goal of this project was to design Bloom Social’s Discover tab and refine the app’s design system to enhance discoverability and boost community engagement. By doing so, we aimed to help users foster authentic connections and deepen their ties to their local communities.
But we asked “How would users differentiate between posts that are open for invites vs. posts that are meant to update their followers?”
Introducing our solution
Event Posts
That distinction became the idea I helped shape and ship: event posts. Instead of a Discovery tab organized around proximity, we built one organized around intent.
Event Posts would be a dedicated post type for anything a host wants discovered. Hosts get a space to publish and update event details; Discovery becomes an events-only feed, so tagging an event is always a deliberate, self-directed act — never something the app decides for you.
ix Flows
Coming together
My team members divided responsibilities into three groups:
- Feature ideation based on the interview and survey results and organize them into a priority x fesability matrix
- Creating user personas and journey maps to understand who we are designing for
- Coming up with a user flow & determine information architecture of the app
I was in charge of the user flow (idk some other way to say this)
(basically users use discovery tab to see event posts, provide in depth filtering). As a host you can set up an event as if it is a post, provide additional information and it will show up in the discovery table.
From Concept to Interface
My Role
I oversaw the user flow and information architecture for Discovery, from early sketches through hi-fi — mapping browsing/filtering, event hosting, and guest actions like RSVP, save, and share. I also contributed ideas to the Now and Create tab integrations, helping keep the event-post concept consistent across the app.
Design
Before jumping into anything design related, we wanted to get a holistic understanding of how people engage with social media and their respective communities
02
Challenge
Client Check-in
Removal of Ratings & Reviews
Idea was turned away by the stakeholders as it wouldn’t be beneficial for the content creator or well-received by users
Event Page Layout
Layout felt inconsistent with the current design of posts. Wanted it to follow a similar design system
Low-Fi to Mid-Fi
User Testing
something abt using the platform, testing on a total of 24, each member reviewed the videos and recorded any thoughts or behaviors. grayed the ones that appeared to run into a pain point. We analyzed the users responses to screen that we are in charge of, and then used that as a point of focus for our next round of iterations
Design rationales
Create Post
33% of testers were not confident on the create screen
“The two layouts are confusing me”
Implementing Event Tagging
- Was in charge of the implementation of the event posts on the now tab
- Biggest challenge, how to account for people that went to an event and want to post about it, allow the event hosters to gain visibility
Created a consistent flow for tagging locations and searching for an event by name or creator’s username
Thus
Results
Our Impact Quantified
13.5%
Increase in Task completion
24%
Reduction in Task Difficulty
39%
Task Completion Rate
Testimonial
“Develop for Good has been an incredible partner and collaborator for our small nonprofit. Their work has given us an exponential boost in our timeline for providing a new nonprofit initiative. It was awesome working with such a hard-working, creative, and organized team of students over a smooth and thoughtful process, and we have been super impressed with their deliverables.”
– Matthew, CEO of nenos Inc.
Chloe Peng 