app for New depaul students
MOST OF THE STUDENTS ARE CONFUSED WHEN ENTERING A NEW EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION. Often new environment is so different that they don’t even know where to start an exploration. The main challenge of this project was to create an app to help new students navigate the university environment.
overview
Client
Fictitious university project for specific student population
Task
In nine weeks make UX research and develop a high fidelity prototype based on findings
Team
Four DePaul students majoring in UX
Role in Project
Ideation
Lo-fi Prototyping
Hi-fi Prototyping
User Testing
Double Diamond Process
- Research – Who are we making this for?
- Analysis – What are the user’s needs?
- Ideation – Ideas → Solutions
- Prototyping – Solutions ⇆ Prototype
- Testing – Testing ⇆ Ideas
research
During the first stage of the project, each member of our group created online surveys and sent those to the representatives (or who were representatives) of our student populations. After that, we shared collected data with each other, went through brainstorming, and posted ideas on the Mural board. This process allowed us to organize the data we received and summarise how our research stage passed.
analysis
During the second stage of our project, based on our findings during research, we defined that the main challenges that our populations face are:
DePaul has a lot of useful resources for students of all years and majors, but students do not know about them or running through troubles by trying to manage all of them together.
Students at DePaul have to cope with many messengers and emails to communicate with DePaul staff and other students. There is no centralized messenger on campus.
Even though DePaul sends a notification about some events and activities on campus, many events can be missed because of bad ads or not knowing where to search. Physical orientation on campus often can be a problem for new students.
ideatION
After analyzing all collected data and tense brainstorming we came up with a few potential solutions for each problem:
Resources
- Collect all DePaul resources in one place (add a description to each resource).
- Provide online support on how to use those resources.
- Make this library of resources easy to find and access.
Events
- Create a board where students can see what events will appear on campus.
- Create an interactive map of the campus to help students navigate both campus locations.
- Allow students to interact with event posts (comment, like, ask questions).
Communication
- Create centralized messenger to connect students with university staff and other students on campus.
- Allow students to write posts about events and clubs activities.
- Create an environment similar to modern social media.
Prototype
For this project we went through creating flowcharts, paper prototype, mid fidelity, and high fidelity prototypes. Using MS Visio, I built the flowchart to visually understand how our app will function.
test
When our group finished Low Fidelity prototype we went through a few rounds of user testing (interviews). Each member of our group was required to have at least three interviews. Script for these interviews you can find here.
Users found camera function unneeded
Since students’ posts have to be university related, they would just create their “random” posts in other social medias.
The necessity of a separate tab for resources
Users found that using few separate resources is hard and it would be wonderful if they could have all resources in one place.
Not enough space for buttons on top panel
We found that our app will need a few other settings, so we placed a settings icon in the place of the profile icon (on the top panel).
After these tests, we made a few huge improvements
Result
In nine weeks we went through all stages of the user experience design process and came up with this Figma prototype. Here is the link to the Figma phone view.
P. S.
Nobody from our team worked on the full UXD process before. To be honest, it was our first UX project ever, but it was completed in time and all documentation was delivered to the client.