Hank is a social network focused on fighting social isolation amongst older adults.
Hank is a social network focused on fighting social isolation amongst older adults.
Years 2020-2024
Role Co-founder, Head of Product & Design
Responsibilities Product Design, User Research, Many other hats
Collaborators 1 product manager, 4 engineers
Platforms iOS, Web
Hank was acquired by Wider Circle in 2024.
I co-founded Hank with Brian Park in 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. We built a social platform designed for older adults to find and organize in-person activities, build friendships, and live healthy and socially rich lives.
I was responsible for every single touchpoint for Hank including the product, brand (with assistance from an agency), email, product copy, social media creative, customer service, and more.
Main product views. Hank connects members to each other via in-person activities and helps them built relationships via chat features.
Assorted UI and brand snippets. I was responsible for any piece of software and brand touched by a end and internal users.
Fighting social isolation amongst older adults.
Our members were typically adults 55+ who had undergone some sort of precipitating event that highlighted their loneliness - moving away from friends to be closer to grandchildren, losing a partner, or retiring and falling out of touch with coworkers. We sought to build a playful social experience with an emphasis on in-person relationships.
Cool things to do and people to do them with. Hank is focused around meeting up with other members in-person and building human connections in the real world.
Activity creation form. We went through multiple rounds of usability testing and iterations to make the form simple to use.
Making an online community feel more human. We have invested in content-rich user profiles and delightful interaction touches to make the product feel warmer and more welcoming.
Keeping members connected. Members that join an activity are automatically added to a full-featured group chat (powered by Stream) that allows members to connect with one another.
Using AI to help scale activity supply
As Hank grows, it is crucial that we maintain a sufficient volume of activities in each market. We have been experimenting with using generative AI to find local activities and create brand new ones. Hank team members can then manually screen activities before editing, deleting, or publishing.
Dashboard for AI-generated drafts. Drafts can be generated, edited, and published from this dashboard. In the background, AI-powered scripting tools generate activities drawn from different sources and processed to help ensure that data is not being hallucinated.
Editing AI-generated drafts. Drafts always refers back to the source material to double-check content and decrease risk of hallucinations. The UI also communicates wherever there were issues parsing data to be fed into Hank's activity schema.
in Philadelphia