Classmate

Empowering graduating students to connect and celebrate: how we drove 650K visits in summer 2021.

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Overview

Goal

Classmate aims to provide an easy way for graduating students to share personal farewell messages within their social network.


Impact

650,000 visits within the first month

Timeline

April - June 2021


Deliverables

Launched Mobile & Web Application


Team

Kay Zhang (Me), Product Designer
Guochao Xie, Full-stack Developer
Qicong Guo, Front-end Developer


Background

The Tradition

Do you remember the yearbooks back in the old days?


About 15 years ago, graduating students in China often used yearbooks to share farewell messages and contact information.

Current Situation

However, this tradition has faded due to the decline of handwritten messages and the trouble of passing a physical notebook to everyone you know.

A Solution?

When I was graduating, I still wanted to start a yearbook, but in a more modern and better way. So I decided to find a solution, and here comes the story of building Classmate...


Discovery

Quick Interviews

Before anything, I did some quick interviews with my college roommates, and here is what I discovered:

Solution Space

I also researched into the existing solution space such as direct messaging apps and online surveys.


The design opportunity lies in merging the efficiency of digital products with the specific purpose of sharing farewell messages upon graduation.


Ideation

Mission Statement

Revisiting our mission, we generated 2 most important features:

Userflow

Providing only the basic features of message & sharing, we created a simple user flow. The flow is very straightforward:

  • For the guest: Open invitation. Edit note. Send.
  • For the host: Create yearbook. Share.

Wireframes

From the user flow, I quickly sketched out some wireframes.


Design

Now showing the craft:

Visual Design Elements

Final Design Prototype - Host's View

Final Design Prototype - Guest's View

Final Design Prototype - All Pages


Development

The Team

I formed the development team with 2 of my classmates: Guochao as the full-stack developer and Qicong as the front-end developer. Both of them are experienced programmers, which enabled the project to be developed at an extremely rapid pace.

The Timeline

There were roughly 3 weeks from our first meeting to the launch of the project. So we didn’t have a complete development cycle, we only took necessary steps for a rapid development.


Result

First Launch

The very first version of Classmate was launched on May 21, 2021. During the 2021 graduation season, we received more than

650,000 visits.

Updated Version

Based on some user feedback, our team made some improvements and launched the second version in July.


The new version allows students to reply to a message and export the message board in pdf.

Some Final Thoughts

There is a social and emotional need, for people to say goodbye upon the end of life stages. 

A couple days after Classmate was launched, many of my friends, classmates, and even people that I barely knew were sharing it over WeChat.


I am amazed to see that such a tiny product could be so popular among graduating students, just as those traditional hand-written yearbook were popular when I was an elementary school student. I am really grateful that Classmate, with its online convenience and social media binding, could help those graduates to say goodbye to each other in a more trending way.