Moving Forward Hub

Universities create plenty of opportunities for first-year students to meet. The harder problem is getting those first encounters to develop into actual relationships. The Moving Forward Hub was designed around that gap, instead of another one-off icebreaker, the intervention brings the same students back together across three progressively deeper sessions using a card-based format to move interaction deliberately from low-risk conversation towards more meaningful self-disclosure.

Students remain in groups of four, initially matched around shared interests. The structure changes at each stage: early sessions are weighted towards easy prompts and shared actions; later sessions introduce more reflective one-to-one conversations. The intervention ends with a Friendship Ticket: three activities the group agrees to do together, with dates attached, followed by a reminder designed to keep that intention alive.

The design was built around a specific behavioural mechanism rather than a general ambition to "help people connect."

Social Penetration Theory informed the progression from surface conversation towards deeper disclosure, while the disclosure–liking effect supplied the central mechanism: deeper reciprocal disclosure can increase liking and interpersonal connection. The Friendship Ticket tackles a different failure point, the familiar gap between "we should do this again" and actually arranging it, by turning a vague intention into specified future actions. COM-B and Self-Determination Theory were also used to interrogate whether students had the capability, opportunity and motivation to participate comfortably.

After submitting the group project, we individually designed a 10-week longitudinal randomised controlled trial recruiting 160 first-year students, allowing for 20% attrition from an a priori minimum sample of 128. Participants would be assigned through stratified randomisation to either the Hub or a waitlist control, with loneliness measured using the UCLA Loneliness Scale and social connectedness through the Social Connectedness Scale-Revised. The study tests three things: whether the Hub reduces loneliness, whether it increases social connectedness, and whether completing more stages is associated with a larger effect.

The more interesting part of designing the study was identifying where an apparently positive intervention could fail. Students opting into a loneliness programme may already be more socially motivated than those who need it most. Progressive disclosure could also become uncomfortable rather than connective for some socially anxious students. And matching around similarity might make early interaction easier while unintentionally reinforcing social homogeneity.

The biggest change I'd make before a real trial would therefore be to integrate the Hub more closely into normal orientation rather than relying entirely on self-selection. The project taught me something I now apply much more broadly: a plausible intervention is only the beginning. The next design question is how you would prove yourself wrong.