Sonder

2025

Sonder is a location-based AR mobile app aiming to alleviate transient loneliness by allowing users to anonymously leave memories for others to view. A Best Overall Finalist in the 2025 Women in Informatics Hackathon.

Role

AR Design, UI Design

Tools

Figma, AfterEffects

Team

Joy Li, Hoda Ayad, Cleo Yumei

Duration

1-Day Hackathon

Explore a Map of Memories

With Sonder, discover the vibrant memories other users leave around you. Mementos come to life in AR space, passing memories from stranger to stranger.

Create Your Own Memento

Type or record your message, and add it to the map! Customize the colors and emotional tags of your memory to make it truly distinct to you.

Place Your Memento in AR Space

With seamless integration from the 2D to AR space, place your memory in its exact location in the real world.

Problem Space

Transient Loneliness

Think back to your first few days in a new city. You might have felt excited, anxious, or like many others, even lonely. This sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity is so common, especially given globalization and the lingering effects of quarantine, that psychologists have a term for it: transient loneliness. In my university (the University of Washington) alone, countless students each year cope with the realities of transient loneliness.

Design Challenge

Finding a Niche

We began our design journey by researching existing solutions to transient loneliness (particularly within the University of Washington). These included apps, websites, and forums. Next, we built out a UX pyramid to structure our primary goals and motivations of our app, thus unlocking key design opportunities to design our experiences for.

Competitor Analysis

In our competitor analysis, we found that transient loneliness currently has many different solutions, from friend-matchmaking apps to community forums. Sonder proposes an abstract, novel glimpse into the lives of strangers, reminding users that there are people all around them. Rather than competing, this can work in parallel to current systems.

Design Opportunities

Encourage: As Sonder’s users are anonymized, a low barrier of entry encourages low-stakes participation.

Explore: Real-time location based augmented reality motivates users to explore their surroundings.
Connect: Glimpse into others’ memories, forming deeper connections to locations.

Visual Development

Finding an Identity

Given their unique intersection as a generation post-COVID, we decided on our demographic as young adults (particularly those between 18–24). Therefore, we wanted it to feel modern and approachable with a futuristic touch. With this in mind, we found heavy inspiration through gradients, pixels, and existing AR applications.

Translating Into the Digital & Spacial Worlds

My role was primary in bringing the mementos to life in visuals, motion, and prototyping. Here are some of my early sketches and explorations in how the mementos may appear, interact with the 2D UI, and move in the AR space.

Visual System

It’s Coming Together!

Given our extremely limited timeframe, it was critical for us to unify design decisions in all spaces: typography, color, UI, graphics, motion, and more. To distinguish between mementos in 2D versus 3D space (along with adjusting them to a smaller size), we created smaller, pixelated versions of mementos to place on maps.

Try It Out!

Prototype

The interactive prototype we presented at the 2025 Women in Informatics Hackathon! Sonder is a location-based AR mobile application aiming to alleviate transient loneliness by allowing users to anonymously leave memories for others to view. A Best Overall finalist.

Final Thoughts

Reflection

My first hackathon experience! This was truly one of the most seamless and efficient projects I have ever done, and I’m incredibly grateful to my team for helping out every step of the way. Here, I really got a sense of how important and strong good delegation can be. I’m also thankful to our hackathon mentors for advising us and polishing our direction.

If we were given more time outside of the hackathon constraints, it would be wonderful to be able to iterate on our design with user testing and feedback sessions. I’d also love it if we could expand our brand marketing and identity: Sonder, given its roots in young adult & GenZ culture, would thrive in a mixed digital-print campaign throughout our university’s campus.