Coo-e: UX Design and Research Intern

2018-2019

I came to Coo-e through my professor and the founder of the startup — who hired me personally after working with me in his academic HCI research lab at NJIT. It was my first industry role, and it was end-to-end from day one. Alongside one other intern, I was responsible for the full user experience — research, design, and iteration — for a globally distributed social-tech startup building a better way for people to coordinate their social lives.

Coo-e was a social coordinator: a shared space where groups could discuss, propose, vote on, and settle plans through features like proposals, voting, chat, and statuses. My focus was understanding how people actually navigate social coordination — what made it effortless, what made it fall apart, and what the product needed to do to fit naturally into real life.

Key Contributions to Core Experience

  • A key target user of this application was college students, who expressed unique needs; Their schedules are dependent on factors difficult to account for when coordinating with others.

    • When a friends classes begin and end

    • How many people need to be present (e.g. for a game, to receive a discount)

    • Not knowing a schedule but knowing a general time frame

    The “Suggest When” feature addresses these needs by…

    • Allowing for a specific or general date/time suggestions

    • Allowing for customizable start/end conditions

    • Linking features (voting, chat, schedule viewer) to proposals

  • The multi-time zone coordinator was a feature that enabled just that. This feature request came directly from the founder of the startup and enabled global and/or virtual coordination spanning time zones.

    I was responsible for not only designing the multi-time zone coordinator feature’s UI, but also various UI elements layered throughout the experience (e.g. a time-zone indicator for profiles).

  • To stay close to users throughout beta, I ran a high-cadence mixed-method research program — largely on my own. Street intercept interviews on and around campus five to seven times a week gave me a continuous pulse on real people’s needs and experiences. Recurring unmoderated usability studies ran five times a week to assess practical functionality as changes were made, with SUS scores tracked alongside qualitative think-aloud data. Surveys were regularly iterated and re-launched to capture evolving coordination needs. Findings were triangulated across all three sources and synced regularly with engineering.

As beta testing of the core experience got underway, research turned toward the future. We were interested in one central question: how might Coo-e support people in broadening their social connections, not just coordinating with existing ones? That led to four opportunity concepts:

  • Find Events — open or public events others could discover and join

  • Find Groups — discoverable groups for recurring engagements or shared activities

  • Find Individuals — an optional public profile mode for finding friendships or romantic connections, with user-controlled settings

  • Recommender Systems — personalized recommendations across all three, drawing on existing connections, location, past events, and interests

These concepts became the foundation for the next stage of research.

Social Network Survey Research

Before we could design for those opportunities, we needed to understand the social landscape we were designing into. — what activities people did, with whom, in what group sizes, and how those patterns varied. I designed a custom web survey to meet those learning goals while being genuinely engaging for participants. To accelerate learning, we made survey completion a requirement for beta access.

The study (n=92) surfaced trends in activity type, location, and group size — and uncovered correlations between academic background, social activity patterns, and number of connections, including the early prevalence of online social activities like e-sports. For participants, it produced a Social Desktop: a personalized visualization of their social connections and activities generated directly from their own responses.

Usability Testing & Launch

I led usability testing across both the survey and the core experience (n=120), running sessions iteratively throughout the beta period with regular syncs with engineering as changes were made. I designed the testing protocols and built a unified reporting sheet to keep the team aligned — tracking expected flows, logging and categorizing issues by type, capturing qualitative feedback and quotes, and quantifying SUS scores by task. Screenshots and screen recordings were embedded directly so nothing got lost in translation between research and engineering.

The app launched three weeks after my internship ended. It was unfortunately short-lived — the pandemic made a social coordination tool a hard sell at exactly the wrong moment. But the work was real, the research was rigorous, and it shaped how I think about user-centered design in every role since.

Coo-e has since rebranded as Coo-We and continues to evolve — now focused on AI-driven professional coordination tools..