UX Research
DropBy
A hyperlocal app for meeting people nearby. We asked 56 people why they don’t say hello, then made the first step feel like opening a pack of cards.
Company
DropBy · design challenge brief
Role
UX research and design · team of four
Duration
2025
Toolkit
Google Forms, FigJam, Figma
At a glance
The problem
People are surrounded by others they’d get on with, at cafés, campuses and offices, but most never start a conversation. DropBy’s app worked, but it felt formal, closer to a form than a hello.
What I made
A playful redesign: drops that open like a pack of trading cards, pixel-art profile cards, a room of your own to decorate, and a quicker path from login to a first connection.
56 survey responses
57.1% worried about intruding
62.5% open, given a natural reason
Context
DropBy is a location-based app for meeting the people around you. You tap once, the app draws a 1 km circle around you, and it shows who else is nearby. Its founders built it after noticing how lonely people feel even with every social app on their phone.
Their brief had two asks. Make the app feel playful instead of formal, and add game elements that make meeting people fun, without losing the human side.
I worked on it with Bhoomika Dadhich, Parajika Sinha and Rugved Rajaram. We split the work into research, ideation and documentation.
The question
Before redesigning anything, we wanted to know why people who are open to meeting someone nearby still don’t. If the answer was “no interest”, no game would fix it. If it was fear, a game might.
Dropping and opening. Drop your location with a thought or a photo, see who’s nearby, then open a drop like a pack of cards: swipe right to connect, left to pass.
The survey
We ran an online survey and got 56 responses. 58.9% lived in metro cities like Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore, 23.2% in tier 2 cities and the rest in smaller towns or villages. Half were 18 or under and about a third were 19 to 24, so this is mostly a student view.
We asked about:
whether everyday interactions have lost meaning
what stops them from talking to someone nearby
how they see the people around them in a café, park or coworking space
what kind of in-app interaction would feel comfortable
when they feel most lonely
The current app
We also walked through DropBy’s current flow screen by screen, from the splash screen to chats, and looked at similar apps. Most either followed the dating-app formula of filtering through profiles, or were formal tools built for basic messaging. DropBy sat on the formal side. It worked, but it wasn’t friendly yet.
56 people answered. Most were open to meeting someone nearby. Worry about intruding was what stopped them.
Sorting the answers
We put the survey charts next to our walkthrough notes on one FigJam board and marked every part of the current flow as keep, improve, replace, remove or gamify.
Three patterns came out of the answers:
The want is there. 62.5% said they’re open to talking to someone if there’s a natural reason. Only 5.4% preferred meeting online.
Fear blocks it. 57.1% worried about intruding or being misread, and 44.6% felt awkward or didn’t know how to start.
Common ground helps. Seeing shared interests first (28.6%) and icebreaker questions (26.8%) were the most comfortable ways in. An anonymous wave came last, at 8.9%.
That changed the brief for us. People didn’t need more reasons to connect. They needed a first step with less at stake.
The concept board for My Space and My drops, where opening a drop like a pack of cards started.
Drops that open like a pack of cards
Every drop deals you a pack of profile cards from people nearby. Swipe right to send a request, swipe left to skip, and tap a card to flip it and see their thought or photo. Opening a pack gives you a reason to look, and the card gives you something to talk about.
A profile card instead of a profile photo
Each card shows your interests, hobbies and Spotify or Letterboxd taste, styled like a trading card. Shared interests are the first thing someone sees, which is what the survey asked for.
Smaller fixes to the flow
Making a drop takes two separate taps, so people pause before sharing where they are.
You can post a thought or take a photo straight from home.
The full-screen map was cluttered, so home shows a small preview you tap to open.
Login checks identity at the start, to keep out spam and fake accounts.
A world that grows with you
Everyone gets an 8-bit character and a room of their own. You decorate it with things you earn, and new rooms unlock based on where you meet people: a disco room after connecting at a club, a library after a bookstore. Friends can visit your room. Achievements, levels and titles like “Bookworm” reward meeting people, not screen time.
The whole app moves to a retro 8-bit look, with Silkscreen and Dot Gothic 16 as its typefaces.
After the hello. My Space and its room editor, the profile card, the Dropmoji avatar, your connections, and chats kept as a journal.
Where it landed
This was a concept for a design challenge, so nothing shipped and there are no usage numbers. We handed over three documents: the research report, the concept deck, and the redesigned flow on our FigJam board.
What I’d do next
Test the card pack with real users before building it. Does it lower the fear, or just add noise?
Check the safety side with women in particular. A location app asks for a lot of trust.
Survey older people. Half our answers came from people 18 or under.
Looking back
The survey turned us around early. We came in planning to make the app fun and left designing around fear. Some questions were multiple choice when they needed open answers, and one multi-select question gave results we couldn’t fully trust. Next time I’d pilot the survey with five people before sending it out.
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