Before diving into the findings of my ethnographic study at University of California, Berkeley, I’d like to disclose that I did not lie about my age or occupation during this entire experiment (OK, I may have said I was a “super senior” once in jest). This was strictly an attempt to push the envelope in my own design practices with the hopes of crafting a better product. Fortunately, the experience was insightful and integral to the success of my latest product.

Wingmen, Kitchen Utensils, and the Greeks

About two years ago, I left TaskRabbit as their engineer and product manager to launch a meet-up website called Tandem, where users each bring a friend when meeting new people from the site. Using this low key online social context my goal was (and is still) to bring people together at a large scale. We launched, iterated, got profitable, but something wasn’t right. User acquisition was hard. Stupidly hard. If the best products merely take steps out of things we already do, our product wasn’t doing that.

It wasn’t until I went to a workshop that I was able to start unraveling why Tandem wasn’t picking up users. During one of Marty Cagan’s workshops at the Silicon Valley Product Group, he shared the success story of OXO kitchen utensils: The company designed its products by applying the Universal Design Principle to fringe use cases — like users with arthritis. This edge case forced the product designer to come up with more effective solutions for people suffering from arthritis, so they put bigger handles on their utensils. Guess what? Bigger handles work better for everybody.

Boom. $273 million dollar business.

I decided to apply the same design principles to Tandem. I reviewed the best edge case I could think of: fraternities and sororities at UC Berkeley. The last thing these students need is a meetup site. Berkeley is close to San Francisco and has a large student population, making it easy for spontaneous social interactions to happen. I chose students involved with Greek life because they have an insane number of opportunities to socialize, but they’re also motivated to meet new people.

Students get drawn into Greek life through meeting fraternity and sorority members in classes. Fraternities and sororities organize social activities three to four times per week, often in the massive house where 150 of them live together. Like I said: insane.

I moved to Berkeley to make it easier to develop the product while testing it at the same time. Through applying the Universal Design Principle and testing Tandem within UC Berkeley’s Greek life, we identified some intrinsic flaws with our product. In turn, we decided to put our product on ice in pursuit of a new project better suited “to put a dent in the universe,” as Steve Jobs once famously said.

Why I chose immersion

I’ve learned a lot about customer development from the Lean Startup methodology and have benefited from working with great user experience designers, who exposed me to cutting-edge design practices like on-site user tests. One thing I’ve learned about designing a great user experience is to truly empathize with what the user goes through. On-site user tests are helpful because they allow a designer to observe the user in their regular day-to-day life, so details that could affect the product experience won’t be missed.

Now stay with me. I’m about to explain how these design philosophies led me to jump head first into moving in with students 10 years younger than me.

I don’t believe it was a coincidence that the most impactful social product of our time was born among students in college. At college there is opportunity for products to get faster traction (via word-of-mouth loop) and faster adoption. If my goal was global impact, continuing to focus on the college demographic seemed like the right choice. I had been doing on-site user testing for a few months, but I wasn’t fully immersed. What if I could not only observe, but also experience what my users are experiencing?

Analogous to method actors who try to experience the emotions of the characters they play rather than simulating them, I wanted to live the user experience instead of intuiting what my users might be experiencing. For the sake of innovation, I decided to dive into a six-month immersion experiment. I would be an undergrad all over again, but this time with a bit more perspective and seasoned product skills.

To kick things off, I recruited a couple awesome interns, Shirin and Eric, who served as liaisons to the Greek system and acted as my mentors in this experiment. This helped me gain access to Berkeley Facebook groups where I was able to engage with various school-related communities — one of which was a housing board where I found a couple of electrical engineering and computer science majors to move in with, Eddie and Jon.

I joined some clubs, audited classes, partied, made friends, and experienced some of the joys and pains of the college experience that I had all but forgotten. Having lived abroad, I knew I was good at adapting to new social environments. I ended up integrating so well that my roommate Eddie, a college senior, claimed, “Will’s more involved on campus than I am!”

My revelation: The Good

Far and away, my favorite aspect of returning to the college scene was the overwhelming energy and curiosity for life, experiences, and people. You may notice some of this walking through campus, but when you spend time with college students, you’ll experience unrestrained excitement about a late-night hike, mad laughter over the latest viral Tumblr photo, or blissful silliness from a goofy face snapchatted to you while walking to class.

This energy explains why students are quick to adopt new products and behaviors. It takes energy and curiosity to try new things. Students are generally on top of the latest products, but not because they’re early adopters. In fact, most are not. The rate at which a product gains traction among early adopters (e.g., the people who bought the first electric car at five times the price because they’re really into the technology) doesn’t indicate if a product will gain mass adoption. However, adoption among college students is a much better indicator, because it contains a more eclectic mix of personalities.

The second aspect of working with college students I found helpful in designing my product, was that people under 25 years of age have an amplified reaction to things. For example, when an undergraduate friend got rejected by a school club, he produced the loudest wailing from a grown person I had ever heard. The sheer panic in my roommate’s voice when he ran into my room asking for help because he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the shower was intense.

As people age and experience more things, I think they become more and more numb to life’s stimuli. Compare the first time you rode a bike versus the last time. But since as a product designer you want to be aware of all the small, nuanced reactions that your product creates, a college student’s highly visible reactions can be insightful.

The third aspect of the college crowd I found useful for designing consumer products is a lack of conditioning. People’s behaviors are influenced over time by feedback they have received. I assert it’s better to design products based on unconditioned behavior, because it’s more conducive to crafting an intuitive experience. For example, for the purposes of my app, I noticed that adults who have been included in (and annoyed by) countless unwanted group texts over time, don’t use group text as much and include fewer people in their groups. However, I saw college students use group text and naturally add every possible relevant person to a group text for fear of leaving anyone out.

Lastly (and this is a gross generalization) is that college students have a short attention span, making them a good demographic for focusing product design. It’s probably an effect of having so much going on between friends, extracurriculars, and studying on top of a continually changing class schedule. This is perfect for consumer product testing because it’s a challenge to get and keep their attention. This additional constraint forces your product to communicate faster and more clearly.

The Bad

There are draw backs to this approach. To avoid sounding a thousand years old, I’m going to be brief. Mostly, it’s the flip-side to the good parts: energy and enthusiasm is exhausting when it means beer pong parties on a Tuesday night (I had to join for the sake of the experiment, of course). Yes, we reused plastic cups and utensils. Yes, the beer pong table was our main piece of furniture. No, no one has bed frames. Amplified reactions are exhausting. Period. Also, the college lifestyle is challenging when you’re accustomed to living with working professionals.

More importantly, immersing yourself within one population means you’re not accounting for other criteria that might be representative of your average consumer, like their purchasing power, daily routine, or job-specific conditions.

The Outcome

While “hanging” with a couple brothers at Kappa Sigma, my friends and I decided to play a game of two-on-two beer pong. Within what felt like 10 minutes, half the house of 100 guys were involved in an all-out tournament. Wow. Something very natural yet powerful happened.

After some thought, the patterns began to emerge as I analyzed this fairly typical college phenomenon. What would an invite system that leveraged this power look like? Certainly not like a Facebook event or Evite. The only necessary parts seemed to be an initial decision followed by simple communication.

I began crafting a simplified solution for bringing people together called RallyChat. Within a couple months, I put a prototype of the 68-character invite system in the hands of some highly-connected ringleaders. My experience had paid off.

Through immersion, I was able to observe a subtle yet powerful experience that most would have missed. I understood my audience well enough to build an app that they’d naturally be inclined to use.

People have different processes for inspiration. For me, I just needed to completely relive my days as an undergrad and play a little beer pong.

Will Tungpagasit is CEO of RallyChat.