Fizz

An app for meaningful student communities

Services:

UI Design

Year:

2024/2025

Link:

fizz.social

Project Summary

Project Overview

The Challenges

Design

The Results

PROJECT OVERVIEW
Fizz Social is a social networking application designed exclusively for university and college students, positioning itself as the "authentic campus community."
The platform’s core function is to provide a dedicated, closed digital space where students can connect with their peers from the same school. Users are typically verified by their university email address. Fizz facilitates open, honest, and sometimes anonymous conversations about campus life, news, events, and shared experiences.
I've initially joined as a UI designer to deliver a number of user journeys but end up acting as a UX/UI Designer on a set of strategic features.

The Challenges

The Anonymity vs. Recognition Dilemma

The core value proposition of Fizz is anonymity, which encourages authentic and often candid conversation. However, the proposed Leaderboard feature directly introduces public recognition and status.

Scaling quality content

The decision to implement Longer Posts (up to 1,000 characters) fundamentally changed the nature of the content and introduces a new challenge for moderation and content quality.

Accelerate the Fizz community growth through scarcity and friend invites

The challenge is optimising the incentive structure and the subsequent onboarding experience to guarantee the referred user becomes a valuable community member, justifying the inviter's use of their limited "Cred."

Business requirements and user needs

Content consumption

Users want to see the history of posts they've previously upvoted/downvoted.

Creation

Users need to create more visually engaging text posts that they can share on other social platforms (e.g. IG and TikTok).

Personalisation

Users need to receive relevant notifications across college and cross-community.

Social & community

Users need a way to build reputation and a home community

Personalisation

Seeing redundant content on Fizzin feed makes it feel stale, especially when there is so much new trending content

Personalisation

Users who don't engage often need a way to personalise their feed.

Growth

Users need a way to invite their non-college friends into the community.

Content consumtion

Creators are concerned about the visibility of their content when there is so much being posted in the New Feed.

Content consumption

Seeing redundant content on Fizzin feed makes it feel stale, especially when there is so much new trending content

Building trust & security

Non-college organisations need a way to create verified profiles.

Creation

Users need lower friction when creating a post: e.g. users want to post TikTok or Youtube video clips (videos of themselves or memes).

Platform Growth

Users need a way to invite their non-college friends into the community.

Problem statement

Fizz lacks a system of public recognition for students who consistently contribute positive content, moderate discussions, and provide helpful insights.

Solution: Structured Gamification

The Leaderboard: a multi-tiered feature designed to reward community activity, foster healthy competition, and elevate the status of our top student contributors.
- Profile Integration: Every user's profile will prominently display their karma and their current daily rank to drive immediate awareness and motivation.
- Five Tiers: Users are placed into Tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond) and only compete against others within their current Tier
- Elite Badges: Users who achieve the Platinum and Diamond Tiers will earn a permanent, visually distinct Badge that appears next to their name on every post they make.
- Top Contributor Highlight: The top 1-3 users on both Global and Local leaderboards will be visually highlighted to acknowledge their status.

Problem statement

The restrictive 200 characters limit is hindering the quality and depth of community discussion on Fizz Social. This limitation creates several problems:
- Shallow Conversation: Users are unable to share complex stories, detailed campus event outlines, or thoroughly explain sensitive topics, forcing them into multiple posts or external platforms.
- Friction in Discovery: The focus on single, isolated posts prevents natural content discovery. When a student reads an interesting post, there is no immediate, low-friction way to find related conversations within the app.
-  Barrier to Engagement: The current path to commenting requires multiple taps and lacks visual incentive, leading to low comment-to-view ratios and a quieter community environment.

Solution

Increased Character Limit: Increase the maximum character limit for all standard posts from the current limit (presumed low) to 1,000 characters.
- UI Integration: Updated the posting interface to clearly display the character counter and limit, ensuring a smooth authoring experience.
- Scalable Post Design: Implemented a responsive design that handles posts of varying lengths, using truncation (with a "See More" option) on the main feed to save vertical space.
- Rich Media Layout: Create dedicated visual layouts for posts that include attached media (images, videos) to ensure media is displayed prominently and aesthetically without disrupting the text content.

Problem statement

As Fizz Social expanded beyond its initial closed communities to "all colleges," it faced a critical scaling challenge. While organic growth was present, it lacked a structured, viral mechanism that leveraged existing, high-trust user networks to drive qualified acquisition. Specifically:
- Passive Growth
- Missing Network Effect
- Inconsistent Onboarding

Solution

An Exclusive Friend Invite System, which provides users with a limited number of high-value invites tied directly to their identity, creating a personalised and urgent mechanism for sharing.
To maximise visibility, users will be prompted to invite friends at moments of high product affinity by accessing Feed Banners and Contextual Pop-ups.

Problem statement

As the volume of user-generated content (posts and comments) across Fizz communities rapidly increases, students struggle to navigate the daily feed. The lack of a powerful and structured discovery mechanism leads to information loss, repetitive content and limited exploration.

Solution

The Universal Search & Curated Discovery Hub
- Universal Search Engine: A dedicated search function will be implemented to allow students to efficiently find specific content
- Filtered Results: Search results must be easily filterable by Scope (Local Campus vs. Global), Content Type (e.g., Text-only, Poll, Media), and Timeframe (e.g., Past Day, Week, All-Time).
- Trending Topics/Hashtags: Surface a dynamic, real-time list of the most currently discussed hashtags and topics within the user's local community and across the Global League.
- User/Handle Search: Allow users to directly search and find other accounts using their chosen handle or school, facilitating direct engagement when anonymity is not a concern.

The results

Project outcomes

- 80% of users who open the "Friend Invite Sheet" successfully copy an invite link or tap a sharing method, indicating the sheet's design is clear and the sharing methods are accessible.
- Increase the percentage of Global League Silver Tier users who perform 3+ positive community actions
- A decreased rate of users who "Back out" of a Post Detail View within 3 seconds by 20% following the redesign, confirming the new layout (including related posts) provides immediate value and reduces confusion.
- Achieved a search success rate of 70% (defined as a user performing a search query and clicking on a result within the first three items), validating the Search & Discover Hub is effective at content retrieval.

Design system: the foundations

Primary colours

Purple 1000
Primary
#7F00FF
Blue 1000

Primary

#3600F3
Pink 1000
Primary
#E100FF
Grey 1000

Primary

#0e0e0e

Secondary colours

Red 1000
Secondary
#821010
Green 1000

Secondary

#00764B
Mint 1000
Secondary
#6A8550
Yellow 1000
Secondary
#F3B03E

Design System reusable components

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