Emily

afloat

Designing a community driven app that celebrates the goodness of your neighbours.

afloat lets you create and join private groups in your community to help each other, from delivering dinner to dropping off a gift or donation to making a grocery run.

Being the design lead on the project, I was responsible for the UX and UI design of the app, and making sure the experience met the users needs. I worked extensively with our development team to make sure every screen and interaction was executed perfectly.

Branding direction

The target audience was essentially family orientated individuals ranging from their mid to late thirties, looking to be a part of a wider community.

The brand needed to be fun and playful, really invoking the community spirit and happiness that the random acts of kindness this app brings about.

We managed to achieve this by creating an illustration style and a colour palette that was warming and joyful.

Giving, asking and picking up

The main purpose of the app is for users to give and ask their groups for help — we needed an action that made this extremely easy for the user to achieve, without any unnecessary steps or blockers. So we created quick, tappable action buttons for each section, making sending a post as quick as possible.
Picking up someone’s afloat needed to be just as simple. With or without an image, the give or ask needed to be the main focus. The users information would also be hidden for privacy until the afloat had been picked up and answered by a group member.
The afloat project was a great chance to really dive into animation, above are some of the animations I created in After Effects to bring the apps onboarding flow to life. You can also take a peek at them on my Dribbble.
I also had the opportunity to create some marketing materials, again created in After Effects, to be shown to investors and on social media to walk through the app and highlight its features which you can see below.