Gator Connect
Helping freshers navigate through college better by fostering a mentor mentee relationship between seniors and fresher
Team
Individual Project
Prompt
Your school wants to strengthen the community by encouraging experienced students to connect with new students and help them adjust to campus life. Design an experience that allows mentors and mentees to discover each other. Consider the needs of both mentors and mentees, including how someone may become a mentor and how to connect mentors to mentees.
Tools
Miro
Notability
Adobe XD
Duration
1 week (Jan 2020)
THE PROCESS
Since this was a week-long design exercise, I felt that it's important to establish a timeline and the design plan first. It was a bit challenging for me initially, but by establishing a timeline I could decide where to stop and finalize the results of each step, therefore avoiding getting lost in the intricacies.
Day 1
Define the problem
Establish a design plan
Create interview questionnaire
Day 3
Establish user needs
Persona Creation
Create low-fidelity prototype
Day 6
Create the case study
Submit the design
Day
Day 2
Conduct user interviews
Competitor analysis
Analyse interview data
Day 4/5
Usability Testing
Creating high-fidelity prototype
THE PROBLEM
Lack of dedicated and trusting platform for communication
Freshers try contacting seniors on various social media platforms , but they do not get much of a positive response from the seniors.
Information on the platforms is confusing and distributed and more often than not present with conflicting opinions.
Seniors do not feel comfortable giving out personal information and contact details to "strangers" over social media.
FOCUS STATEMENT
How can we create a dedicated and authentic communication platform for freshers and seniors?
THE SOLUTION
A mobile application with which freshers (undergraduate and graduate) can connect with the seniors based on similar research and extracurricular interests.
Ask your question on a public platform
Students can read and comment on the discussions posted on the forum. There is also an option to search a question by a specific tag or text. The user can also comment on a post or question put up by peers.
Discover seniors with similar interests
The discover feature allows the user to new people, groups, and tags based on interests. The people tab is further divided into three types: peers with the same major/minor, same research interests, and same extracurricular interests.
Instant messaging
Direct messaging platform to communicate with the seniors and ask questions.
I have included all the features that a standard messaging platform offers like attaching a file and voice message.
Smooth onboarding experience
This application asks you to signup using your university email and then save the user's research interests, hobbies, and tags that he wants to follow.
Lets dive into the process!
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
The 5 W's
The prompt that was given wasn't specific enough for a problem statement. So, I decided to start with the 5 W's method of defining a problem statement.
Why is this important?
The seniors and freshers have no reliable and popular channel of communication to form connections.
Who are the users?
Students of the university, who seek mentorship as well as those who want to mentor their juniors.
When and where will this be used?
This can be used at any time right from when you accept an admit to your graduate school choices.
What is being designed?
An experience that connects freshers and seniors to create a channel for communication
USER RESEARCH
Who and how to contact?
For my user research, I decided to conduct user interviews and competitor analysis. Even though I had been through the process of joining a university, I decided to conduct user interviews keeping in mind the mantra "I am not the user". Through user interviews I gathered new information that was actually totally against my assumptions and was a refreshing point of consideration.
Affinity Diagram of the data from user interviews
KEY INSIGHTS
1
Mentees prefer contacting seniors with similar interests.
2
Lot of information is available on Facebook groups or Quora i.e. public forums.
3
People do not feel comfortable giving out personal information.
Why an app and not a website?
The prompt did not specify what type of experience is to be designed. I decided on designing a mobile application; User interviews revealed that students use LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Reddit on a smartphone as mobile applications.
Therefore a mobile application made more sense than a web application as the target users are the students of the university, both incoming and seniors.
WIREFRAMES
Rough sketches are always very useful to get an idea of the functionalities and layout. First, I created rough sketches of every significant screen.
PROTOTYPE USED FOR TESTING
FOCUS ON TABS AND PROFILE
Since this was only a week-long exercise, I had to limit the exercises that I would design and perform usability testing. So I decided to keep the main 4 tabs and the profiles for the seniors and groups.
Doing this helped me to focus on the critical aspects of my design and gather feedback on it.
Feed
Discover
Inbox
Contacts
Profile
Group
Chat
USABILITY TESTING + UPDATES TO DESIGN
My ideation process was as follows:
-
Create the essential screens and produce interactive prototype.
-
Test the prototype on target users (1-2 participants each test) and refine the screens accordingly.
-
Repeat step 2.
KEY INSIGHTS
1
Connection request is unnecessary.
Users felt that connection request seems unnecessary as all the users of the app are from the same university and interact with each other through the app.
Updated profile
2
Access to profile is complicated when it is one of the essential elements.
Since the connection request functionality was removed, there was no need for the contacts to be displayed. Also access to the profile and making changes to interests should be easy which led to the following changes.
Original navigation bar
Updated - Profile instead of Contacts
List of joined groups in feed
Profile
Updated Feed
3
Year of study is also important. It should be mentioned in a senior's profile.
The original design displayed the degree and major of study, but not the year. Users voiced that they would want to know. the year of study of the senior as well.
Year of study mentioned in the discover
thumbnail as well as in the profile.
4
The discover page is too overwhelming with multiple categories.
The discover page has people with three different categories, groups and tags according to the user's interests. User Testing uncovered that it was quite overwhelming for the users to make effective use of the page and functionality.
So, I decided to split the page into two -
Discover
Original Design
Discover
Peers
Updated Design
FINAL DESIGN
Onboarding
Sign up through college email
Users can use only college email address to sign up for the app. This maps to the user need for privacy and since college database will provide the necessary details like major, minor, degree and year of study.
All the user needs to enter are research interests, extracurricular interests and tags to be followed.
Navigation
Essential functions accessible on one-click
Essential Functions of the app like viewing discussions, discovering people and groups based on interests, and instant messaging are accessible through navigation bar at the bottom.
Profile for a peer/senior includes the basic information and an option to contact them. The profile page for a group is pretty much similar. For a chat window, I decided to keep it minimal and included the basic functionalities to attach a file and send a voice message.
"See all" for people with similar interests
I realized that a classification based on interests would be more effective for functionality to "discover seniors".
The classification is via three labels - major/minor, research interests, and extracurricular interests.
REFLECTIONS
1
Do not assume anything - User research is very important, even in a sprint.
This was a week-long exercise. Initially, I was of the opinion that since I can be included in the category of the target users I can move ahead after conducting minimal user research. Most of the assumptions that I had made proved to be wrong after conducting user interviews. If not for user interviews, I would not have thought of associating "tags" with the posts in public forum of the app. This exercise taught me the exact meaning of "I am not the user".
2
Iteration is most important for designing; it provides you with a different perspective every time.
I am glad that I was able to incorporate user testing and iteration of the design within this exercise. My initial design satisfied the basic requirements of the users but was far from ideal or even usable. With the three user tests that I conducted, each time with different people, I was able to gather different perspectives and the resulting updates to the design made it easy to navigate and much more effective in learnability.