PartyPal
A responsive app that takes the pressure away from partying by offering resources for safety and sobriety.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Timeline
Dec 2024 - Mar 2025
Products
Website & App
OVERVIEW
Safety-First Party Planning
After learning about a shooting that injured three people at a UC Davis fraternity during Picnic Day 2025, I felt compelled to create a solution to help people stay safe at parties and events. During HackDavis 2025, UC Davis’s annual hackathon, my teammates and I developed PartyPal — an app designed to help users find safe and sober parties, access overdose relief, and quickly locate emergency resources.
Project Brief
PartyPal is a mobile app prototype built at HackDavis 2025 to promote safety at college parties by helping users find sober events, overdose aid, and emergency resources.
Goals
Designing a safety-focused party app to:
Help users locate sober and secure events
Provide quick access to overdose and emergency resources
Promote safer socializing on college campuses
Problem Statement
Many individuals face challenges around safety and peer pressure in party environments, which can often lead to unwanted danger and/or substance use.
PartyPal supports safer partying and empowers individuals to make healthier choices without compromising their experience.
DISCOVER
Understanding the Audience
I had many questions coming into my research process:
What is our main target audience?
What would incentivize our target audience to use our app?
What type of content and features do our users want to see?
Research
User Research
To identify the target audience, I created a survey and gather 130 responses in under 24 hours supplemented this with extensive online, data-driven research.
Competitive Analysis
I conducted a thorough analysis looking at other apps with similar initiatives/features and focusing on these points:
Site Strengths/Pain Points
Unique Features
Target Audience
Customer Acquisition Methods
Affinity Mapping
Using the insights from my user research and competitive analysis, I created an affinity map to assist me in defining the key features and resolutions for the PartyPal app.
DEFINE
Identifying Users & Features
Through my research, I gained a clear understanding of PartyPal’s app user demographic and behaviors. This helped me identify the target user’s goals and pain points, and behaviors.
Target Audience
US high school and college students aged 16–30 who enjoy partying safely.
Their main pain points at parties are being drugged, around drugs, in a dangerous place,around dangerous people
User Goals
Being around friends or safe people.
No peer pressure at parties
No substances at parties
Key Features
It became clear after categorizing the key features that the PartyPal app should focus on safety with sobriety being a secondary focus.
App
Event Safety Analysis Report (AI)
To help users make their safety-first decision before going to an event.
Emergency Resource Map
To help users locate emergency resources quickly in times of need.
Advanced Event Sobriety Filtering
To help users find events that align with their goals.
EXPLORE
Designing a Solution
User Flows
Structure (Lo-Fi)
FINALIZE
Developing the Visual Identity
I knew that I wanted to make the UI minimal for testing and simplicity of use. In order to capture the festival energy without using gradients or patterns, I chose to use a vibrant sunset orange for the primary color of the UI and round the logo and web/app elements for a playful feel.
UI
Final Product
App Visuals
Home Screen
Splash Screen
Map (Location Selected)
Map (Location Unselected)
Profile
App Guide
REFLECT
Key Takeaways
Quality over quantity
During the initial creation of PartyPal, I was constrained by a strict 24-hour deadline imposed by the hackathon. One of the categories we aimed to win was “Best User Research,” so we spent several hours collecting as much user data as possible. After not winning the category, I took time to reflect and realized that the issue likely wasn’t the amount of research we gathered, but its quality.
Although the insights were informative, I now understand that a more focused approach—prioritizing depth over breadth—would have been more effective in understanding our target audience and designing a more impactful app.