Splace

Role

Product Designer, iOS Developer, Graphic Designer

Team

Ben Artis

Tools

Figma, XCode, Photoshop, After Effects

Introduction

When I joined the project (before it was called Splace) the concept was purely just pictures, added to pins (locations), organised into 'maps' (groups of pins) which can be shared with users.

It look a lot of ideation, refinement and restarting of the project (thanks to covid and business related changes) to find something that filled a hole in the market.

The result was Splace, a community social media app that let people share their world with the world.

Problem

It's well knowns that despite the wealth of social media apps that we have, teens today feel more isolated from each other than ever. With feeling like when they share their opinion online, it just goes into the void and it's up to an algorithm to decide if people see it or not.

This isn't how we communicate in the real world - We wanted to make something that represented how communities actually structure themselves and function in the real world, in the hopes of creating better tighter knit communities, as well as improving the discovery of new communities.

Solution

Our solution was Splace - A combination of the words 'Space' and 'Place' which was the underlining structure of Splace.

Spaces would be topic for communities to be built around, like Travel for example.

Places would then be nested subtopics, and possibly even subcommunities, that are related to that topic, like Tips, Photography or Recommendations for Travel.

Posts can be made to a Place, self categorising it for user's to find, while also appearing on the Space level, allowing user's to get a broad overview of what's happening in the Space.
This structure extended to each user's profile as well, giving them their own Space and their own structure of Places as well - Allowing each user Spaces to be completely unique to them and represent exactly who they are and what they're into.

Development

Being the only designer in the company, I was heavily involved in all aspects of the product, from the typical product design role that I'm used to, to a SwiftUI developer coding the UI up to free up developer resource to work on more complex parts of the app, to creating the branding, marketing and graphics for all of the spaces.
The vision for the app was for it to be immensely flexible, in order for it to mould to what ever users wanted to do with it. This philosophy is baked right into the product, with every Space and Place backgrounds being a completely customisable colour, with most of the UI being contained in fill colours and layered on top, so maintain legibility and accessibility.
We also wanted to support as many media types as possible from day 1, so we ended up creating a beautiful post browser that had 2 states, a media viewer and then swiping up to view the post details, meaning the visuals and the interaction was the same for every post.

Results

I love the result of Splace - it took a while, but I think the concept and philosophy we ended up deciding on and the execution of it throughout the app was great. It was an enormous lesson in how app philosophy can (and should) influence the UI/UX consistently through the whole experience.

It was also an amazing experience in getting to build a product from ground zero, which doesn't happen very often - It massively changed the way I approach product design and development.