ROLE

UX Designer

TIMELINE

10 Weeks

TEAM

Natty Solomon,
Melissa Pao, Jordan Kussmann

TOOLS

Adobe XD,
Photoshop,
Illustrator

PROBLEM

The University of Washington offers an abundance of secondary resources aimed to support students throughout their academic careers. Unfortunately, due to lack of awareness it is difficult for students to identify the resources available. Furthermore, students are faced with larger class sizes and are struggling to find ways to connect with their classmates.

SOLUTION

Our integrative mobile app serves to present college students with resources that cater to their specific course schedule.

Problem statEment

How might we improve access to secondary educational resources?

How can we influence our future design decisions based on user research?

USER RESEARCH

To gain a stronger understanding of who we were designing for we conducted a series of research methods, including interviews, personas, and journey maps. We discovered many key insights that will be used to guide our designs in the ideation phase.

PERSONA

The personas highlight the target audience, which are college students both varying in college level and access to existing resources. They both demonstrate common users who are impacted by the problems identified in our research.

USER JOURNEY MAP

Following the personas, I created a user journey map to help highlight one of our persona, Lily’s experience with the Center for Learning and Undergraduate Enrichment (CLUE) and her upcoming midterm exam.

How can we design an experience that caters to our users?

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

With a strong understanding of our users experience, we created a sitemap to visualize the key touch points within our design solution.

USABILITY TESTING

Following the post-task questions and observations our group discovered that one of the biggest strengths of our design solution was how intuitive it was. With this in mind, I continued to shift our designs to present users with an easy and seamless experience

Click below to learn more:

ANNOTATED WIREFRAMES

I created wireframes for each key screen alongside annotations to explain my design decisions. In the screen below, it showcases one flow of connecting with classmates on our A+ app:

Annotated Wireframes

Following another round of usability testing and peer feedback we gained several insights that I applied to our final designs. Here are some of the key takeaways:

Replace the to-do tab with a “connect” feature. Users discussed the to-do tab reflected too similarly to a calendar, and would find more use in connecting with their peers
Place more emphasis on the connect feature within the product. Through our research a common pain point where users needed to connect with their peers. With this in mind I placed the connect feature as a core function of the product.
Include a progress chart as a way to notify users of upcoming deadlines and study groups offered on campus. Rather than emphasizing a notification bell, use the progress chart as a method to motivate students to utilize secondary resources.

Connecting students with fellow classmates

“There are 700 students in my class, it's hard to find the right person to study with.”

- Participant 2

Academic resources filtered by class

“It's hard to find all the different tutoring centers offered for each of my registered classes.”

- Participant 5

More than an academic calendar

“I wish I could find a calendar that would better integrate my academic, professional and personal life”

- Participant 3

REFLECTION

I worked with my team for at least ten hours a week, where I learned firsthand the skills of proper team communication, efficiency along with ebbs and flows of creative friction. If I had more time, I'd simplify our app. Towards the end of the design process, we realized the potential of our app and developed it in all sorts of directions. After bringing an even greater wave of functionality to our app only brought more complexity, and in today’s society, simplicity is the key to efficiency.

A+