Build IRL

Product Design Intern

Creating a club-community building platform to help reduce burnout in club builders.

Context: What is Build IRL?

Build IRL is a platform designed to empower club builders with the right tools and the right people to bring in-person communities to life. Build IRL is redefining how communities are built by preventing club builder burnout by building clubs with members, and is rooted in three core values:

Sustainability

to prevent burnout & create lasting communities.

Connection

to foster genuine relationships through real-world interactions.

Fun

to build vibrant club experiences for builders & members.

Problem: Can we help define the key user flows needed for an MVP and develop features that activate Build IRL’s value proposition?

…But, more specifically we needed to do the following:

Normalize and celebrate the act of joining clubs.

Make it easy for club builders to ask for monetary contributions.

Enable seamless personalization and club creation.

And most importantly, help find clubs the right members.

Research: What existing insights do we know about our club builders?

Builders are overwhelmed.

Those new to community building and club management are overwhelmed with the process.

Builders are suffering from major burnout.

Even if a builder is more experienced, they are frustrated and tired of working alone and with so many tools.

Builders are reaching for more.

They are struggling to create a distinctive vibe for their club, and to attract the "right" new members.

Research: Who are Build IRL's competitors? Let's analyze them.

Since Build IRL does not have direct competitors, we analyzed the adjacent platforms in the event and club spaces such as Partiful, Luma, Sweatpals, and more.

Using these findings, we then mapped these platforms in a competitor matrix in order to evaluate engagement and whether they prioritized members, club joiners, or managers, club builders.

Research: Conducting interviews with builders across different communities.

We conducted user interviews in order to answer the following questions we had:

How builders currently and/or hope to structure and sustain their communities.

How membership dues play a role in longterm financial viability.

Which factors most strongly influence attendee commitment

The tools and processes that have/haven’t worked so far

Using an interview script to maintain consistency across all of our interviews, here are a few highlights of what we asked our interviewees.

What’s the hardest part about building and maintaining your community?

Have you ever used any Apps/Tools to help you to organize or run group events?

If you had unlimited resources, how would you build or improve your community?

Research Synthesis: What do our builders have to say?

"I spend hours on invitations and logistics. It’s draining.”

Club Builder

“People ghost after two meetups. How do I keep them invested?”

Club Builder

“We use Eventbrite, Meetup, Discord, and Slack. None of them talk to each other.”

Club Builder

Research Synthesis: What insights can we pull from our user interviews?

Fragmented Tools

80%

of our builders mentioned struggling to manage events efficiently because they relied on 5+ disconnected tools, leading to wasted time and missed RSVPs.

Burnout

65%

of our builders quickly burn out from the unsustainable workload of event logistics, marketing, and retention, leading to abandoned communities.

Trust

44%

of builders mentioned that new members hesitate to join communities because they lack visibility into organizer credibility and group culture, leading to low sign-up rates.

Research Synthesis: Affinity mapping, problem statements, and personas.

Using affinity mapping, we grouped together the data and insight gathered from our interviews. This helped us identify patterns, themes, and more insights.

Out of eight themes and patterns we analyzed, these three themes: Burnout & Sustainability, Financial Strain, and Member Retention were talked about the most.

Out of six problem areas we analyzed, these three areas: Finding the right people, Managing the right people, and Engaging the club were talked about the most.

These insights helped our understanding of the builder and joiner experience, allowing us to create our user archetypes.

Using the three themes and three problem areas, we constructed the following HMW statements for targeted and innovative ideation in our next steps.

HMW simplify club setup and streamline tools to reduce burnout?

HMW help builders attract the right members by clearly articulating membership values and club vibe?

HMW retain the core values of BuildIRL and help joiners and builders alike to “find their people”?

Ideation: Brain dumping, brain writing, and brainstorming!

Here's a glimpse into one of our many ideation sessions!

With our many ideas from our ideation sessions, we each focused on just a few based on factors like feasibility and impact, to start designing our low-fidelity prototypes.

Ideation: Creating user flows for joiners and builders.

Prototyping: Unexpected, but helpful!

At this stage, we were unexpectedly given a Figma file containing high-fidelity desktop designs of the platform.

Although this came as a surprise, it didn’t change our mission or values for the design. We remained focused on reducing burnout and helping builders connect with the right joiners. In fact, having access to their prototype turned out to be super helpful, giving us more clarity as we moved forward!

Prototyping: Mid-fidelity and high-fidelity designs

Based off the existing screens from the Figma file we were given, we decided to create mid-fidelity designs based on a desktop view. Here's a few designs we created.

Prototyping: Design curveball: from desktop to mobile.

After presenting our mid- and high-fidelity designs, our founders gave us some pushback. They wanted a mobile first instead of desktop, which took us aback at first. Still, we pivoted quickly and adjusted our focus, turning this challenge into an opportunity to design a stronger mobile experience.

We started again by creating mid-fidelity prototypes.

Prototyping: Build IRL brand guide.

At this point in the process, we given a brand guide which provided us with guidance on colors, fonts, styles, and the overall brand voice.

Final Prototype: The final Build IRL design (after many iterations)!

Using the brand guide given to us, we created our final Build IRL screens and flows, starting with a joiner joining a club.

Our next step was to focus on one builder archetype: those starting clubs from scratch. This was just the beginning, as we wanted to expand our solutions to support all types of builders.