Typely: Connection, Reimagined

Seri Park

Creative Product • UX Designer
Seri Park is a Product & UX designer blending visual storytelling, interaction design, and generative systems to craft intuitive and immersive digital experiences. With a foundation in graphic design, human computer interaction, and data-driven storytelling, she creates playful, dynamic interfaces that connect people, whether though interactive visuals, evolving digital ecosystems, or AI-powered creative tools.
Thesis Faculty
Sam LavigneEthan Silverman
Typely: Connection, Reimagined

In a world where thousands of online “friends” can still leave us feeling lonely, Typely is reimagining how we forge meaningful social connections. Typely is an AI-powered mobile application designed to help people find their tribe through personality insights and smart matchmaking. By blending the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework with data from users’ favorite social platforms, Typely connects users with compatible individuals and communities in a way that feels intuitive, personalized, and fun.

Social media has connected the world, yet genuine connections remain elusive. Students and young professionals relocating or seeking new friends struggle to find people on their wavelength. Gen Z and Gen Alpha users are drifting away from noisy public feeds toward private, niche communities – but discovering the right community or partner is often by chance. Remote workers and freelancers miss the camaraderie of the office and want colleagues or collaborators who align with their personality and values. Self-improvement enthusiasts yearn for deeper conversations and structured interactions rather than superficial chatter. Community managers, for their part, are looking for better tools to foster engagement and harmony within their groups. Across these scenarios, people spend countless hours filtering through posts, profiles, and events, hoping to stumble upon meaningful relationships. There is a clear need for a solution that reduces the friction in finding truly compatible friends, peers, and communities.

Typely provides a fresh solution to this modern social dilemma. The app’s onboarding begins with a playful MBTI-based personality quiz, creating a detailed profile of each user’s character and preferences. From there, Typely’s AI engine gets to work – integrating insights from the user’s social media footprints (Instagram likes, Facebook groups, Reddit communities, Discord servers, Meetup history, and more) to paint a holistic picture of what each user cares about. Using this rich data, Typely suggests people, groups, and events that “just feel right.” It’s like having a personal matchmaker who knows your personality inside out and scouts the digital world for kindred spirits.

Typely’s user experience is distilled into four simple but powerful sections – Dashboard, Connect, Connections, and Profile:

  • On the Dashboard, users get daily curated suggestions and interactive features like Vibe Roulette, which spins up a serendipitous introduction to a person or community that aligns with the user’s vibe.
  • The Connect tab offers step-by-step AI guidance to explore recommended individuals and niche communities. It might guide a user through discovering a study group of fellow ENFPs in their city, or a new designer friend who also loves hiking and shares their creative mindset.
  • Connections helps users manage their relationships – from tracking new introductions and pending invitations to seamlessly continuing conversations. Typely doesn’t confine interaction to its own chat: if two users hit it off, the app can facilitate moving the chat to WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Discord, or whichever platform they prefer, making sure the spark of connection isn’t lost.
  • The Profile page is the user’s personal hub. It showcases their personality type, highlights from connected social accounts (such as top interests or mutual communities), and a “favorites” section where they can save interesting profiles or groups to revisit later. Privacy controls are front-and-center, letting users choose what aspects of their social data to share and keeping their personal data secure.

Unlike generic friend-finder apps or interest-based forums, Typely combines three unique strengths.

1. First, it uses proven personality insights (MBTI) as a matching foundation – tapping into a language of personality that millions of people already understand and enjoy.

2. Second, it leverages existing social platforms rather than competing with them; by integrating with Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Meetup, and more, Typely acts as a unifying “meta-platform” for connection, saving users time hopping between apps.

3. Third, Typely’s AI-driven guidance provides a concierge-like experience – it doesn’t just toss users into a feed and hope for the best, but actively guides them through finding and nurturing new connections step by step. Early adopters describe Typely as “the friend-finding app that actually gets me” – a testament to the personal touch that our technology enables.