Spawn - iOS App
Role: Product Design Lead, iOS Developer
Ethan Hansen,
Daniel Agapov,
Daniel Lee,
Shane Mander,
Haley Wong
Mobile
Design Systems
Branding
Figma
SwiftUI
PROJECT OVERVIEW
People struggle to hang out casually and spontaneously.
Coordinating plans with your friends can be frustrating, especially in less bright cities like mine (Vancouver, Canada). Organizing events takes about one hundred back and forths, and traditional event planning tools such as Google Calendar and when2meet feel too formal for a casual hang out.
Early research insights from our initial survey of UBC students
83% of people believed they spend too much time on their phones, 91% wished there was an easier way to plan events.
We surveyed people at our university to uncover more about how people felt. In our studies, we found that people often subconsciously categorize the people they spend time with - for example, your pickup basketball friend group is different to the friends you might go to a bar with on a Friday night. We honed in on this, as it offered a unique way for us to decrease the time it takes to organize an activity if premade groups already exist.
Its clear that students and young adults alike find grievances with traditional event planning systems as a method to do activities with your friends.
How might we build a better system for young university students to plan spontaneous events casually?
EARLY EXPLORATIONS
Spawn's humble beginnings as a design hackathon project
The first iteration of the app was designed for a UX competition hosted at UBC. The system was built around the idea of events filling a social media feed, and a map where you could see the locations of all of your friends' events from a birdseye view.
The 1st iteration of prototypes designed for BizTech's UXOpen design competition by the original Spawn team.
Although I was not a part of the original team that built this version, I included some of the early wireframes below to show how our thinking has evolved since then.
Accessibility scored low and user flow lacked depth.
The chosen font was too thin and the contrast between text and background was too low to meet WCAG 2 standards. Additionally, the app lacked a cohesive design system, and the user flows were not intuitive enough to onboard new users.
Moving into development, the dev team wanted a scalable and consistent design system to reference as they built out new features. The designers were also unsatisfied with the branding and overall aesthetic of the app, and wanted to create a more polished and professional look before any code was written.
INTERVENTION
How I transformed Spawn from a concept to a scalable app.
When I joined the team, I built a new design system from scratch in Figma. This included a new color palette, typography styles, button components, and iconography.
Schema - Friend Tags & Events vs. Activities
We decided to pivot the app to focus more on activities types rather than events. Originally our idea was to group your friends with tags (ex. "Basketball Buddies", "Study Group", "Party Crew") and have users create events that their friends could join. However, we found that this created friction in the user experience, as users had to go through a tedious process to choose who to invite. Instead, we decided to simplify the process by allowing users to create activities that were categorized by activity types (ex. "Gym", "Chill", "Hiking"). This allowed users to quickly create an activity and have all of their friends who were interested in that activity type notified.
The new prototypes for Spawn v1, released on the app store.
We aim to foster casual user behaviour
Whenever a user is doing something like going to the gym or relaxing at the park, they could announce that to their friend network in a few button taps. From there, all of their friends would see what they were up to, when it was happening, and where it was going to be through our map feature.
We built the app using SwiftUI for mobile and Java + Springboot + MySQL for the backend. We used Firebase for account verification and push notifications. We leveraged the iOS native MapKit framework for our geolocation features.
NEXT STEPS
We're still working out some kinks.
Our team has recently launched the beta of our app on the app store. We've reached 105 total users and are hoping to gather more feedback as our app grows. Check it out at the links below!
© OCT 2025
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