Abroad
Meet students abroad and explore your city's best events.
Abroad is an iOS app and web app designed to help study abroad students connect to each other and to the cities they temporarily call home. It bridges students, local businesses, and real experiences into a single ecosystem that makes unfamiliar places feel navigable, social, and human. Rather than replicating traditional social networks, Abroad focuses on presence, proximity, and shared experience. The goal is not more content, but better connection.
Founders
Abroad was built by four college co founders Conner Kopischke, Jackson Galley, Tristan Arnovick, and Harry Raftus. As students themselves, they understood the friction of arriving in a new city with no built in community. They set out to build something practical and calm. A platform that helps you meet people quickly, find what is happening nearby, and feel grounded in the place you are living in right now.
Challenge
Abroad entered a space crowded with noise. Social platforms often prioritize scale over relevance, feeds over place, and engagement over meaning. For students abroad, this creates friction. Too many tools, too little context. Too much digital noise layered on top of an already unfamiliar physical environment. The challenge was to design a platform that felt calm, trustworthy, and intuitive while supporting real world discovery, location based interaction, and community building. Abroad needed to feel modern without feeling disposable. Social without feeling performative.
Process
We started with a simple question. Does this platform help students feel more grounded in the world around them. That principle guided both the product and the brand.
The iOS app and web app were designed together as a single system. Structure was prioritized over spectacle. Navigation was intentional. Features were introduced progressively to reduce cognitive overload for users already adapting to new cities and cultures.
From an engineering standpoint, the platform was built to scale responsibly. Location data, user grouping, and discovery logic were designed with clarity and performance in mind. The technology stays quiet so the experience feels natural.
Visually, the design remains restrained. Typography is clear and legible. Motion is minimal and purposeful. Interfaces favor clarity over novelty, reinforcing trust and usability across both the iOS app and the web experience.
Results
The result is a platform that feels stable, human, and ready to grow. Abroad launched with a clear identity, a functional and scalable iOS app, and a web app foundation capable of expanding across cities, universities, and communities. The system is built to support new features, new markets, and deeper integrations without losing its core purpose. A product designed to help students feel connected, not overwhelmed. A platform built to last as long as the experiences it supports.
