Building Connection With Fewer Taps

Social networking platforms are built to keep users scrolling, liking and reacting, often delaying direct interaction in favor of curated feeds. For Amedeo Ercole, that structure raised a simple question: What if conversation came first instead?

A senior majoring in computer science at the University of Maryland, Ercole has spent the past year helping to develop Vex, a mobile app that connects users around shared interests with as few interactions as possible. The platform allows users to state what they want to talk about and be matched with someone interested in the same topic, removing the need to navigate profiles or feeds. 

“A lot of social platforms are built around scrolling,” Ercole said. “We were interested in what happens when conversation becomes the first action instead of the last.”

That emphasis on immediacy has shaped both the app’s design and Ercole’s approach to development, prioritizing clarity and intention over feature density.

Roots in Maryland

Ercole grew up in Cecil County, spending most of his childhood in Port Deposit and Perryville. His family owned and operated a local restaurant, where long hours and daily routines shaped his understanding of responsibility and persistence. He said that environment continues to influence how he approaches work.

“Being around a family business teaches you that things don’t work unless you stay determined,” Ercole said. “That mindset carried over once I got into higher education.”

When deciding where to attend college, Ercole chose to remain in-state and enrolled at UMD. The decision allowed him to stay close to home while entering a rigorous computer science program, a balance he said aligned with both his academic and personal priorities.

Early Curiosity Grows

Ercole traces his early interest in technology to his mother, who he said was eager to try new devices as they became available. Watching her experiment with early smartphones and touchscreen computers sparked questions that stayed with him as technology became more embedded in everyday life.

“As a kid, it all felt like magic,” Ercole said. “Once I realized people were actually building these things, that’s when I wanted to understand how.”

That curiosity followed him to UMD, where coursework emphasized systems-level thinking and problem-solving. Classes in systems programming, algorithms and data science required students to apply concepts under pressure, often through project-based work. Ercole said the unifying thread across those courses was not memorization but the expectation that students could explain and use what they learned.

From Idea to App

The concept behind Vex emerged as Ercole began thinking more critically about how people engage with social technology. He and his collaborators were interested in whether online platforms could prioritize direct conversation rather than prolonged content consumption.

That idea began to take shape during a student competition organized in collaboration with the mobile game company Voodoo. Participants submitted app concepts that were gradually narrowed down to a small group of finalists. Vex was selected and received initial support to move from concept to prototype.

“That competition was the push to actually build something,” Ercole said. “It took the idea out of theory and forced us to think about execution.”

After the initial backing, the project became fully student-led. Ercole worked with three co-founders at other institutions. Yuxiang Cheng, a Harvard University master’s student in human-computer interaction, leads user experience design. Ruitao Zou, a backend engineer at the University of Toronto, and Yufan Chen, a backend engineer at the University of Southern California, focus on core systems development. 

Designing for Simplicity

As development progressed, user experience became one of the project’s central challenges. While artificial intelligence supports interest matching behind the scenes, Ercole said the team focused on ensuring users could quickly understand how the app works.

“AI is powerful, but people still need to understand what’s happening,” Ercole said. “If the interface isn’t clear, the technology doesn’t matter.”

That philosophy led the team to limit visible features and reduce the number of steps required to start a conversation. Much of that work was refined through collaboration with the UMD’s App Dev Club. Over the course of a semester, student engineers helped transition Vex from a prototype to a production-ready app available in the App Store.

Since its release, Vex has reached nearly 2,000 downloads. Early usage patterns suggest that most users initiate a conversation shortly after downloading the app, aligning with the team’s original design goals.

Moving Forward

Looking ahead, Ercole said the team plans to continue refining Vex based on user feedback and to monitor how people engage with the platform.

Reflecting on the experience, he said building software for real users has reshaped how he approaches development.

“Things breaking is part of the process,” Ercole said. “What matters is knowing your system well enough to fix it and being able to explain it to the people you’re working with.”

As he prepares to enter the field, Ercole said those lessons are likely to extend well beyond any single product.

—Story by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications