Have you ever been bored on a train? Ever wanted to talk to the person next to you but didn’t know how to start a conversation with a complete stranger?

Research has shown that when people have conversations with strangers, they feel happier and more satisfied than those who go about their days in solitude. Even a five-minute conversation leads to elevated moods and feeling more connected, for both introverts and extroverts.

We’ve built an app that helps you start conversations anywhere by finding people in your vicinity who share your interests.

Inspiration Strikes

People like face-to-face conversations.

But meaningful random encounters are becoming rare. A new rush of mobile phone technology has made it easier to put on your playlist, ignore the world, and play a fruit-slicing game on your iPhone. With Chat, technology helps you get back to what matters — human connection.

Our app is for people in public spaces: trains, subways, waiting rooms, parks, and long lines. We want you to pull out your phones, hit a button, and get connected to a stranger in your vicinity. Once you’re connected, we give you three things: a photo of your stranger, some common interests, and a starter question. Then we help the two of you find each other and start talking.

Features

Safety first. We do not allow children under 18 years of age to use this app. To help you feel as safe as possible, we added a “Flag” feature on strangers you’ve chatted with. A user with enough flags will be permanently blocked. To prevent multiple accounts, we link user accounts with verified phone numbers.

Seven minutes. We promise.

We know you’re busy. This app is meant for brief conversations. So we’ve added a seven-minute timer to go off when a conversation is over. This is for people with full schedules, people who want a short chat to brighten their days. It also gives users an easy out if they want to cut a conversation short.

Of course, if you and your stranger really hit it off, there’s no need to follow the timer.

Interaction and Navigation Design

We wanted a clean, minimal interface. This app is meant to get people off their phones.

The profile component of this app imports the user’s interests as tags directly from their Facebook profile. No other information needed (age, area, bio, etc.) because we want the app to remain an anonymous interface for casual conversation, not an evaluative dating or matching app.

There are two actions users perform on the app (apart from the preliminary log in/profile info actions): finding a stranger and starting to talk. Finding a stranger is one simple action: a button, “Push to Chat!” that begins the search. Once we find a stranger, the user can accept the person or choose to skip, searching again. If accepted, we help the users find each other and give them some conversation starters to discuss.

From this screen, no further action is needed. Get off your phone and talk! After seven minutes, the app alerts users that the suggested conversation time has passed.

Your time is important.

Visual Design

Clean and simple. We chose a dark gray, light gray, and golden yellow color scheme. Opting for more blank space rather than less, we minimized the number of buttons and features to ensure that every feature has a direct and immediate purpose.

A sleek, friendly opening page with welcomes users with a distinct, thin font and contrasting grays. Chat’s design embodies efficiency, trustworthiness, and stress-free action — three principles we stand behind.

Try out the prototype below and let us know what you think!