Our Solution
My team and I addressed this problem by designing a mid-fi prototype "Ami" as a mobile app that helps students connect in smaller social meetup groups (2-5 people) based on their similar interests, personalities and values.
Project
Team
Class group project at University of Toronto in collaboration with the iSchool Innovation Hub. This project was designed to cater towards fostering connectedness among students of UofT.
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(Sep' 2020- Dec' 2020)
Hsiang-Huei You
NIcole Sin Ting
Qinglan Chang
Sana Javeed
Xinyi Yang
My Role
UX Designer
Story Teller
Prototyping
User Research
Wireframing
*Tools used: Balsamiq , Mural, Zoom
Design Process
Ideation
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Wireframing
Next Steps
Persona
User Research
As-is scenario
User Research
31 surveys and 14 interviews were conducted to learn what are their preferences in communicating with peers and to understand why they felt this way
Results
not find university social events helpful
21 out of 31 UofT students did
10 out of 14 UofT students felt
felt awkward in large group settings
Using the data from the surveys and interviews from the students, we created a persona with the focus on the students' pain points.
Our Persona
Meet Ivan.. a first year international student pursuing masters program at University of Toronto. He just moved from Mexico to Canada with a hope in meeting new friends. His hobbies are to play the guitar.
Name: Ivan Martinez
Age: 24
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Status: First year student at University of Toronto
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Nationality: Mexican
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Location: Toronto, Canada
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Hobby: Playing guitar
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Goals
To have his own squad who share similar interests and build meaningful connections
We created an As-is scenario to capture the Ivan's pain points during his journey.
As-is scenario
Not aware of peer's interests
Aimless searching
Language barrier
Unable to maintain meaningful connections
Ideation
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To address Ivan's needs, our team brainstormed some ideas and plotted them on the prioritization grid using Mural
5 ideas - High Impact & High Feasibility
Prototyping
We created some paper prototypes for each user story before moving to the usability tests with representative users.
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Ivan the student can identify interests and personalities of peers before first approaching them.
Feature : Create a personal profile with tags that show interests that show chat rooms for
Add tags that match your interests
Chat rooms matching interests
Answer questions
Share group answers
2. Ivan the International Student can start a meaningful conversation with peers spending no time finding a topic.
Feature : Topic Raffle for generating topics based on common intrersts
Conversation prompter
Topic of the day
3. Ivan the International Student can create memorable shared experiences with peers without leaving his room.
Feature : Include Icebreaker games to play with peers
Recommended games
Game room
We tested our prototype with 3 representative users who are UofT students. And then used Balsamiq for wireframing and incorporating the fixes. Here are the results:
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Usability Tests
"NO search bar"
Mistaken "Add my own" as "Search"
"Cannot skip"
"Unable to view Room information"
"Join " button not intuitive
Wireframing
"search bar"
Skip option
populate tags based on search
Removed "Join" button
Group chat info
Storyboarding
Next steps
Provide onboarding screens on main features of the product
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Change UI icons of navigation bar to make it familiar
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Perform a second round of usability Tests with the clickable Medium fidelity prototype
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Lessons learned
Usability tests
They reveal user's different perspectives and issues; despite heuristic evaluations
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Team effort
Ux design is all about working in a team of diverse and creative minds
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Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!
To avoid cognitive burden, design features should not overburden the user with too many features
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