Derek
張德文
Topos is for making new friends and enjoying hobbies together.
I joined Topos as the first designer and led a design team of 3 later. We built and tested the alpha version of our app, reached out for seed funding, pivoted, expanded our team, kept iterating, and eventually launched on Android and iOS around April 2021. We acquired 2,000 active users before taking a step back from the project in early 2022.
We believe social media should augment genuine relationships instead of replacing them. This is a severe problem in the Chinese market, home of TikTok and saturated by competitors. Teenagers are reported to be more “isolated.” The problem has deep roots, and we want to kick off systematical changes by offering a platform for connections instead of entertainment.
The original concept we had was a platform for users to post long articles about their profession or interest so that users can get to know each other at a deeper level, spark conversations, and connect. Because we thought all content on current social media platforms is too fragmented and consequently the connections between users are weak. We decided to do the exact opposite and assumed long articles would trigger closer connections.
We had a functional prototype when I joined the team. My first task was to improve the stitched-together UI. I made some tweaks in the color palette, and focused my redesign around reading experience. I started with text size, line height, then defined the look of the building blocks of the screen, adjusted the visual hierarchy, add a progress bar, and scrolling position preserving. The changes were well received internally. We gained the confidence to hand it to a group of about 70 potential users for testing.
The result was clear that our first solution didn’t work. It was almost impossible to motivate users to read long technical articles, and even harder to write them. Among the article posts we had, we saw a lot more conversions to conversations from stories, poems, or photo sets than the “articles with deep thoughts” we were aiming for. However, we made promising progress building team and workflow.
We learned from our research that the key to genuine connections is to spend time with someone voluntarily. Meeting in-person and spend time continuously is much more effective than online in a fragmented manner. Our revised solution is to provide space for users to make acquaintance by exchanging their own stories then guide them to nurture the connection further through in-person meetups.
After deciding on our new direction, we used the same backend system to get our new prototype online as fast as possible. This time, I go back and forth with our developers more often. Instead of designing everything before handing off for implementation. I created small patches so the developers can work parallel with design and shorten the feedback loop of our changes.
As our testing user pool expands and meetup groups starting to form as we hoped, we launched Topos on both Android and iOS in April 2021.
We put Topos on hold in early 2022. Initially, our goal was simply to create our own alternative social media. We wanted to take it seriously, register as a company, get funded, and launch our product. Looking back now, we achieved them all. We also underestimated the effort required to promote and maintain the community we envisioned. On top of that, another round of Covid lock down hits China, it’s probably not the right time for encouraging face to face meetups. We all take a step back to focus on gaining experience in our own fields. Maybe one day we’ll get back to it to realize the grand ambitions of rebranding, UX overhaul, and properly running the community.
