JIO

by Team 5

A UX prototype designed to help friend groups plan gatherings more effortlessly through a single, intuitive platform.

Created as part of a UX assignment focused on social impact in Singapore, this project follows a user-centered design process, from research and ideation to prototyping and testing. The app addresses common group-planning challenges by bringing everything together into a seamless experience.

Working in a team of 4, we developed Jio around three core pillars: inspiration, schedule coordination, and expense tracking. Through user interviews, usability testing, and iterative design, we shaped a solution that supports meaningful social connections while reducing the friction of organizing events.

As Project Manager, I helped guide the overall workflow and contributed in research, evaluation, and persona creation..

UX Process

We conducted in-person interviews to understand group dynamics, planning habits, and pain points. These insights informed our user personas, journey maps, task flows, and design decisions, allowing us to refine the application and ensure that each feature directly addressed real user needs.

Through interviews and analysis, we uncovered several recurring issues across user groups:

Scheduling conflicts

Lack of responses in group chats

Last-minute cancellations

Difficulty finding suitable activities

Manual and confusing bill splitting

Most participants relied on messaging apps, simple polls, and manual calculations, leading to unnecessary effort.

These findings directly informed our core product pillars and feature decisions:

Scheduling

Introduced shared availability tracking so users can easily indicate their free time within a one-week window

Activity Discovery

A social feed for users to explore, share, and receive recommendations based on preferences and location

Expense Management

An integrated bill splitting and payment tracking to help groups settle expenses easily even when overseas

By grounding our design in real user behavior, we ensured the final prototype addressed genuine pain points while creating a smoother, more enjoyable group-planning experience.

Ideation & Prototyping

Then we started with collaborative paper prototyping to map core task flows and user journeys before moving into digital lo-fi designs to refine layout and navigation. Below I have included the flow and key screens we came up with.

User Testing

Following that we conducted usability testing, using our lo-fi prototype, with 8 participants across 4 user groups. Participants were given task flows to complete while we observed behavior and pain points so that we could change them in our high-fidelity prototype.

Confusing Wording

Unclear Navigation & Button Purpose

Information Overload

Improvements made

Simplified Language

Clarified Navigation Labels & Buttons

Content Prioritization

Visual & Brand Direction

Jio takes its name from Singaporean slang meaning “invite,” reflecting the app’s goal of bringing people together.

The visual identity uses bright, friendly pastel colors to balance professionalism with approachability. The logo, inspired by a raised hand, symbolizes a warm invitation, while stickers, badges, and mascot emojis reinforce Jio’s identity as a social group app.

To maintain a clean and cohesive interface, we chose SF Pro Display for its modern look and versatile weight variations. The colour palette consists of five pastel tones supported by black and white to provide contrast and improve clarity across the app.

Final Product

Finally we created our high-fidelity prototype in Figma which showcases the complete user flow across onboarding, group planning, activity discovery, and expense settlement. Feel free to interact with it below to explore the features and experience how Jio brings everything together.

Jio App Prototype

Reflection

This project strengthened my understanding of user-centered design and reinforced the importance of translating research insights into practical UX decisions. I especially enjoyed creating personas and learning how different behaviors and needs shape product features..

I also gained hands-on experience with heuristic evaluation, which helped me critically assess competitor apps and identify both usability strengths and gaps to inform our own design.

Overall, this assignment taught me how to better evaluate interfaces and design more intuitive, effective products. I’m proud of how our final prototype turned out and look forward to applying these skills in future UX projects.