Expressoh!
Connect over coffee: meet professionals, build relationships, grow your network.
0→1 Product Design
NYC connection paradox, connected yet isolated
You’d think in a city like New York, meeting new people would be easy. But for many grad students, young professionals, and career-changers, it’s actually the opposite. Everyone’s busy, routines are packed, and starting a conversation can feel awkward. From our early interviews, it was clear—people want to connect, they just don’t know how or when.
What if meeting someone in your field felt as easy as grabbing a coffee with a friend?
Connecting young professionals across the city over shared values, goals, with a cup of coffee
Where Coffee Meets Connection
Swipe to Explore Cafés
Discover local cafés that fit your vibe.
Smart Matching
AI assisted chat
Rewards
Prompt-Driven Illustration System
Designed a reusable Sora prompt inspired by original sketches to create a hand-drawn icon set spanning categories, UI states, and avatar styles.
Style Guide
How we identified user challenges?
100+
survey responses and among them 8 users were interviewed, young professionals new to NYC (less than 2 years), to explore challenges in building meaningful connections.
Why?
Young professionals find traditional networking awkward and overly formal.
How?
We designed Expressoh!—a swipe-based app that connects users over shared values and café meetups.
Who?
8 users interviewed: grad students and early-career professionals seeking authentic social connection.
The users loved…
What worked, what didnot
Green indicates users were successful in completing the task, yellow means users experienced confusion or needed assistance, and red shows they were unsuccessful. Overall, most tasks were completed successfully across participants, as reflected by the predominance of green.
Insight to Iteration
Insight 1
Users needed a clearer, more focused rewards screen—leading to a simplified design with integrated progress tracking.
Insight 2
Users found the anonymity disconnecting and wanted to see faces earlier to feel more comfortable and engaged.
"I would like to see their faces. Seeing the real person's face humanizes them."
Insight 3
The Home page was redesigned to prioritize upcoming meetups and café discovery, shifting the focus from user avatars to shared spaces for more intentional and intuitive connections.
Find Your People,
One Café at a Time
You’ve swiped through cafés, connected with your daily match, and scheduled a meetup—now the Home screen brings it all together.
Revisit your liked cafés, see your upcoming meetup, and explore spontaneous tables you can join in real time.
Whether you’re planning ahead or showing up in the moment, Espressoh! turns every café visit into a chance to connect.
Connection needs context
Users were more open to networking when they could see real faces and shared café preferences
Small UX changes—like simplifying navigation and labels—helped users feel more confident exploring the app.
User testing challenged our assumptions and pushed the design to be more human, intentional, and adaptable.