I completed this project with the guidance of my mentor. The constraints of this project included the following: design a product intended for University of Michigan students, design a product that doesn't already exist (UMich has multiple mobile apps for different purposes), design a product that solves a problem faced by college students. After conducting our initial exploratory research, we decided on designing an app for UMich students to be able to find events, search for organizations/clubs, and join study groups.
Date Started
June 27, 2020
Date Completed
October 15, 2020
My Responsibilities
Conducted user interviews
Collaborated on transcribing interviews
Collaborated on initial low-fidelity sketches
Created wireframes based on low-fidelity design
Created tasks for first-click testing
Conducted first-click tests
Collaborated on high-fidelity design
Created tasks for usability testing
Conducted usability test
Tools Used
1. The Challenge
Problem to Solve
Students have a difficult time making connections at large universities; there isn’t a central platform where all students can post community events, find community events, and learn more about the student organizations/clubs offered at their schools.
Our Goal
Use technology to assist students at large college campuses (specifically at the University of Michigan) in: cultivating connection and community between students in a single organized platform.
2. The Design Process
Competitive Review
We began our project by conducting some initial exploratory research. We completed a competitive review of the apps currently used by UMich students. We identified the key features and what the apps were lacking in order to identify opportunities. At this stage of the project, we did not have an idea in mind yet. Thus, we were still searching for a problem to solve
Literature Review
Along with the competitive review, we conducted a literature review to identify the current research on students at large universities and forming connections and relationships.
One research article involved a study that found around 32.4% of the university students in the study stated that they felt moderately lonely. The researchers identified two types of loneliness which included:
A deficiency of close/intimate relationships that leads to emotional loneliness
The lack of a network of social relationships that leads to social loneliness
Both types of loneliness were associated with depression and anxiety. Our goal was to design a product that cultivates connection and social relationships, so we kept this research in mind when moving on to the next step in the project.
Reference:
Diehl, K., Jansen, C., Ishchanova, K., & Hilger-Kolb, J. (2018). Loneliness at Universities: Determinants of Emotional and Social Loneliness among Students. International journal of environmental research and public health, 15(9), 1865. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15091865
Interviews
After conducting our initial research, we moved on to the next stage of the project: empathizing with the user. We interviewed three current undergraduate students at UMich, and transcribed the interviews to perform open coding to identify major themes.
After analyzing the results of the interview, we discovered that most students found out about student organizations/clubs through the Festifall which is a one time campus event. Other than that, the methods students used to find out about campus orgs and events was through their social networks, word of mouth, and flyers posted around campus. Within organizations, students used a variety of different tools to communicate with each other which included Slack, Email, GroupMe, and more.
We realized that there isn't a central organized platform that contains information about existing clubs/student orgs and campus events. We decided that the focus of our project would be to design a mobile app that students could use to view information about all campus events/organizations in one central place.
Initial Sketches
After analyzing the results of the interviews, we started working on creating initial rough sketches for the design of the UMich Event Finder mobile app. We created lots of quick sketches to get all of our ideas out on paper to identify which ones we thought would work best for this project.
Wireframes
After generating our sketches, we combined them, and refined them to create a set of wireframes. We used the wireframes to set up first-click testing to determine if the design of the interface was intuitive enough for users to be able to carry out specific tasks.
First-Click Testing
We had 10 users complete first-click testing on our wireframes; they each were presented with three tasks to complete. Overall, we had positive results and most users clicked in the correct areas.
Task 1 (shown on the left) asked the users where they would click to search for study group. 80% of users clicked on the correct area, which was the middle icon on the bottom navigation bar.
Task 2 asked users where they would click to see events from the Association for Women in Mathematics, and most users (80%) clicked in the general correct area. So, they were able to identify the Association for Women in Mathematics organization in the "academic" category. However, only 40% of users click on the arrow which was deemed as the correct area.
High-Fidelity Design
After completing the first-click testing, we created the first iteration of the high-fidelity design. The high-fidelity design would be used during usability testing to uncover any issues that were present within our design.
3. The Results
These are the results from the usability for task 1 and task 4. Task 1 asked users to find a specific study group, and task 4 involved locating an event to save for later. Task 1 had the most errors, task 4 had the least number of error
Usability Testing Results
We conducted usability testing with four participants who are current undergraduate college students. The usability testing involved participants completing four tasks using our prototype.
Based on the results of the usability test, users had the most difficulty finding a specific study group as asked to do in Task 1. This seemed to be the most challenging task for users to complete, as all other tasks had an average of around 2 or less errors per person. Participants could not easily locate the page designated for study groups, which is currently labeled “study.” We would relabel the button to “study groups” in hopes to make it easier for users to be able to more easily identify the page for its purpose. Otherwise, the results are overall positive in terms of being able to complete tasks with a minimal number of errors. The success rate was 100% on all four tasks.
If given more time on the project, we would have opted for more participants to complete the usability test to get a better sense of college students’ initial interactions with the prototype. We would have also liked to conduct more interviews with students who hold executive board positions in campus organizations. This would've allowed us to understand what their thoughts on this application are, and what they would hope to get out of using this type of application. We would have also liked to conduct more research on the targets users’ needs on campus, and implement more of those needs into the design of this application.
