Concept
2025
espressoh!
Connecting young professionals across the city over shared values, goals, with a cup of coffee.
Overview
espressoh! is a social networking app designed for young professionals, graduate students, and career changers in NYC who are seeking support and meaningful connections.
By facilitating genuine, in-person coffee meetups, espressoh! fosters authentic relationships and builds a supportive community, eliminating impersonal cold messaging and promoting lasting bonds.
Challenge
Newcomers to big cities such as NYC, especially young professionals, grad students, and career changers, often struggle to build meaningful relationships that support their social and professional growth, as most social platforms prioritize surface-level interaction over real-world connections.
Our Goals
We saw an opportunity to connect NYC’s vibrant coffee scene with people looking for more meaningful and lasting relationships.
Our goal was to create a fun and supportive platform that encourages people to meet offline and build casual, authentic connections. We focused on three core objectives:
Solutions
Start with a shared café
Café preferences become the first signal for connection. Users swipe on spaces they like, then discover people with similar tastes, creating a natural reason to start a conversation and turn digital matches into real-world meetups.
From shared cafés to deeper connections
Daily matches build on users’ café preferences, with filters for industry, purpose, and skills helping them find relevant people. Profiles reveal experiences, hobbies, and cafés in common, giving users a fuller picture of who someone is and more common ground to connect over.
Make meetup planing effortless
An AI virtual host helps break the ice and coordinate a meetup, taking the friction out of turning a first conversation into a plan. Once confirmed, reminders keep the details on track, while in-app arrival check-ins make coordinating on the day seamless.
Keep the connection brewing
Bean Bucks reward the small actions that help connections grow. Users earn points by following up with a match, meeting at a new café, and staying engaged, giving them the motivation to keep nurturing relationships beyond the first meetup.
Visuals inspired by the warmth of café culture
The visual direction was shaped by the warmth and familiarity of café spaces, where community, creativity, and casual collaboration come together.
Research
Understanding what gets in the way of deeper connections
The team collected 79 survey responses and conducted 7 in-depth interviews with people who had moved to New York City within the past three years, exploring how they build and maintain connections in a new city, as well as what they look for when choosing cafés and spaces to connect.
What we learned
Insight 01
Meaningful connections can open doors professionally.
Social connections often serve as a gateway to valuable networking opportunities.
Insight 02
Shared interests create common ground, but starting the conversation is hard.
People feel more comfortable connecting within their industry but struggle to start conversations.
Insight 03
Busy schedules make it hard to turn connections into plans.
People struggle to make plans because everyone is busy.
Insight 04
Cafés are chosen for more than coffee.
People seek cafés that fit the kind of conversation they want to have, from casual socializing to professional meetings.
Our North Star
The problem wasn't finding people to meet. It was finding the right place and reason to build deeper, lasting connections.
Iterations
Testing our ideas to create better experiences
Simplifying rewards redemption
Users found the rewards redemption process confusing and struggled to find key information. I removed the leveling system to eliminate the need for two in-app currencies, XP and Bean Bucks, and relabeled the primary CTAs to make the redemption process clearer.
Improving the homepage layout
The initial homepage layout did not align with users’ mental models and expectations. I prioritized upcoming meetups and reorganized the café discovery section to make key information easier to find and improve the overall flow.
Reflections
Designing for connection meant designing the conditions for it
This project gave me the opportunity to practice balancing user needs with business goals. I explored how gamification and reward systems could encourage real-world connections while creating value for partner businesses. Building the visual system and component library was especially rewarding, as it allowed me to bring branding strategy into product design while creating a foundation that could scale with the product.
