Overview

FOMO is an event-discovery and volunteering platform built for college students, designed to solve a problem where valuable campus events (workshops, hackathons, networking sessions) went unnoticed outside the host institution due to reliance on word-of-mouth and physical posters. The MVP launched in Lucknow, was tested live across three colleges, and reached 400+ combined sign-ups and event registrations before the project was acquired by VIVAX

As sole designer, I owned the full design process, research validation, information architecture, onboarding flow, and two major product differentiators: a trust-gated volunteering system and a Reddit-style community layer while coordinating directly with the CEO, PM, and dev team under a compressed pre-launch timeline.

Problem Statement

College students regularly miss valuable events, workshops, hackathons, and networking sessions happening outside their own campus. Discovery relied entirely on word-of-mouth or posters shared within a department, both unreliable and limited to a student's own institution. This meant students had no consistent way to find relevant opportunities beyond their immediate circle.

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The problem: The gap wasn't a lack of events; it was visibility. Valuable events existed constantly, but discovery stopped at campus borders. Word-of-mouth and posters worked only for the department that made them.

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The solution: Give events a home beyond their host campus. Let organizers publish once and reach students anywhere, and let those same students volunteer their way in turning passive discovery into active participation.

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Problem identified by the client based on personal experience; validated by the team through student surveys and interviews before design began.

What I Was Solving For

1. Cross-campus discoverability

Surface events beyond a student's home institution, without relying on manual sharing

2. Low-friction entry

Let students browse and evaluate events before being asked to register; keep the eventual sign-up flow to the minimum required fields

3. Trustworthy volunteering

Give organizers a reliable way to review and select volunteers, with stronger verification available when an event needs it

4. Reasons to return

Give students a reason to open the app outside of active event-hunting, through community spaces tied to organizations they already follow