SVERM was a 4th-year project I did with a fellow student, Andreas Offenberg. The task was to make an app for a specific user group – our choice.
We chose to focus on skaters as Andreas had domain knowledge, being a skater. We focused on 20-30-year-olds, researched skate culture through reading, looking at skate magazines, content, and brands, did interviews to reveal values in the community, discovered problem areas, and found that a lot of users used Instagram to find skate spots, see who was out, find new spots (geotag). We found that there were certain aesthetics and phrases within the skate community and we tried to reflect these in our solution: We saw the opportunity for an app that embraced skate culture, and that encouraged people to get out and skate, making it easier to meet other skaters, see who is out, see where people are skating, what tricks are they trying at a certain spot. We wrapped it in a format that reflects the values, aesthetics, and strong community we saw through our research.