A social app that connects young professionals in NYC through shared café favorites. Expressoh makes it easy to meet, network, and build community—one coffee at a time.
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Young professionals relocating for jobs.
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👩🎓
Graduate students starting new programs.
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💼
Career-changers seeking new industries.
Swipe your favourite cafe's
Talk to those in your industry
Earn rewards, every meet up
Lowering barriers to connection
Makes it easier to start conversations by matching over shared café choices.
Creating purposeful routines
Transforms casual coffee breaks into structured opportunities to meet peers.
Blending habits with networking
Turns the natural love of café-hopping into chances to grow professional circles.
Now that you’ve had a peek, let’s go behind the scenes.
79%
Feel building friendships in a new city is important
65.8%
Think approaching new people in a new city is not easy
“I have a lot of friends who have a big connection in the city. So when I go out to an event with my friend, I would meet other people that are friends of my friend and the people who are friends of the friends.”
“It’s hard to make deeper-level connection because people are busy and no space for small talk at school.”
“I talk a lot when I know the person but don't know how to start a conversation.”
“When meeting with someone through the app, verification is important.”
“People are busy, so it’s hard to schedule ahead.”
Competitive Analysis (left), SWOT Analysis (right)
User Retention
After a meetup, there’s often no structured way to help users maintain new connections.
Reliability, trust
Lack of mandatory verification leads to safety concerns and decreased trust in the platform.
Matching
Appearance-based matching leads to superficial decisions and missed opportunities for lasting connections.
Competitor research showed users are already comfortable with swipe interactions. We adapted this for Expressoh to ease networking. It got us thinking, how can we…
Match people with cafés that fit their needs and preferences?
Make networking feel more natural and less transactional?
Encourage ongoing connections instead of one-off interactions?
We started off by sketching things out by hand! ✏️
Then bringing things to mid- fi for user testing. 🎨
01
Clarifying Redemption Flow
7/8 users struggled to find the “CoffeeUp” card to redeem items. After simplifying the design and merging pages, users could access info and redeem more easily.
"The name of the thing that you bought would be great to see. I want to remember what I ordered in the past. The QR code is easy but gets lost in the illustrations."
02
Faces Build Trust
Avatars were introduced to avoid appearance-based matching, but users felt the anonymity was distancing and preferred seeing faces earlier for comfort and engagement.
"I would like to see their faces. Seeing the real person's face humanizes them."
“What is a heart icon in navigation? Would “like” be a better option?”
03
Cluttered Homepage
The homepage was redesigned to spotlight upcoming meetups and café discovery, moving the focus from avatars to shared spaces for more intuitive connections.
"I feel like there are too much information on the home tab"
"Would love to see reminders, or some sort of notification for upcoming meetings"
The Power of Iteration
Feedback revealed where the app felt overwhelming or unclear, guiding us to simplify interactions and highlight what truly helps users connect.
Test every assumption
We assumed swipe-based culture might encourage superficial connections, but testing showed users still value trust and authenticity in seeing who they’re meeting.
