The Problem.
Canadian university students need a way to:
find interesting events to meet new people
reach out to other students interested in the same events to feel more comfortable going out
connect with other like minded students to improve their social life through connectivity
Our Research.
Based on 39 interviews and surveys with UofT students, we found that students struggle to make the first social interaction.
What UofT Students Are Saying
“I wish I had friends to go with to events.”
— UofT Student, 2019
“I want to meet people who like the same things I do.”
— UofT Student, 2019
Ideation.
We brainstormed multiple ideas and organized them into thematic clusters as illustrated on the left.
We chose to go with student profiling and matching through a digital mobile platform.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Usability Testing
One of the common comments we received from 4 out of 8 of the users was to include more detailed instructions especially between screens ‘Profile Information’ and ‘Interest Prompts’.
Therefore, we added a new screen titled ‘Instructions’ which instructs the users on the next step of setting up their profile on the Campus UNI-ty app.
Next, we added a ‘back button’ on all screens as this navigational component was highly requested across all the users from our the usability tests. Adding this button allows for better navigation across the screens.
Medium-Fidelity Storyboard
We developed our Low-Fidelity Prototype into Medium-Fidelity Prototype based on 8 usability tests on UofT students across the campus. The above sequence illustrates the Happy Path of our mobile UI app design.
The Result.
Introducing our mobile UI high-fidelity prototype:
Campus UNIty.
Campus UNIty is a social mobile application designed to connect like-minded students, either one-to-one or one-to-many, on campus. Through the use of our app, we hope that students will feel more connected and represented on campus. Our goal is to enable student connections and hope that every student would have at least one familiar face in each of their classes.
What’s Next?
We completed 8 summative testing on UofT students across campus using our high-fidelity prototype, we found that a major concern was the navigation and accuracy of the series of questions.
Campus UNIty is still in its high-fidelity prototype. If this project were to develop further, design and testing will be reiterated a couple of times until the product is more polished in terms of both design and usability.
Key Takeaways
Test, Test and Test again! – Testing is key for improvement. As much as we were proud with our design of our prototype, we knew that we could still improve.
You are not the user. – We had to separate ourselves from the design to avoid creating a product that does not meet the users’ needs.
Follow a user-centric story not a product-centric one. – The solution would not be a solution without a need from the intended user.