Deloitte. Innovation Challenge ⊹ Best UI/UX award
I designed an event-finder app to boost student engagement on Georgia Tech campus.
Role: Sole designer
Team: 2 Business analysts, 1 Deloitte mentor
Outcome: Presented prototypes, branding and a business proposal to a panel of Deloitte representatives and Georgia Tech admins.
Timeline: 3 Days
The challenge: find and solve a problem on campus through app design. I created GT Club Connect, an event-finding app. This platform empowers student involvement and allows campus organizations to scale.
Deliverables
Persona mapping
Research surveys
Design concepts
Prototyping
Final presentation
Responsibilities
UI & UX design
Primary & secondary research
User survey
Prototyping
Mobile app design
Delivery
Condensing club information to events and student ratings.
My design splits up club profiles into easy-to-find page views to split up important information and also provides users with recommendations for similar clubs. This allows for students to casually engage with club events, reducing entry barriers for participation.
Honing in on live search features.
I designed a map view layout to view the locations of live events, and also introduced an alternative filtering option to help students find events that are within their budget, or within certain activity categories.
Simplifying communications and recommendations.
Communication platforms such as Slack, Discord, and GroupMe already provide easy interfaces to foster community once a student commits to an organization. To not hinder those already ingrained systems, we anticipated that students would prefer a simpler, passive event notification system. Users receive for events they’e signed up for, and receive personalized invitations to events they match to!
Standard features: onboarding and school selection
I designed Club Connect with scalability in mind. If a service such as this one is successful on one campus, why not expand to more? We created a simple onboarding experience, and direct students to sign in through their university into the app. After logging in, they have access to their school’s events!
our simple onboarding process
school search and login
The Problem
Georgia Tech has more than 300 student clubs and organizations, but students still struggle to find events and feel connected on campus. Current club bulletins are bloated with out-dated information, and events are largely de-centralized.
“Joining clubs and events can be tough without knowing someone. Some clubs claim to be open, but seem exclusive”
“It’s so hard to fully commit to a club when I don’t have time for all of their activities.”
Auditing the GT Engage Page
The current club bulletin isn’t usable, so clubs aren’t incentivized to use it.
Thousands of clubs are listed in alphabetical order, so most clubs aren’t reachable in this list format
Profiles are given little structure to describe themselves, just a single text box to input information. For example, this organization provides little info about what they actually do.
On the other hand, this profile is too wordy, and making it difficult for users to sift through the information.
I made some edge case observations on the bulletin.
The filtering function is very cluttered and not optimized for accessibility or usability. Drop-downs for categories with 20+ items need to have some kind of text search, or at least resize the scroll to a usable size, for example.
After auditing the bulletin, I interviewed 30+ students to understand sentiments regarding campus engagement.
It’s hard to keep track of events.
It’s hard to balance school and maintain a social presence. As clubs use so many different platforms to communicate, it becomes impossible for students to keep track of information as it is released. This overload can reduce attendance.
It’s hard to commit to clubs.
Students find it difficult to commit to clubs, and this can lead to reduced participation in club events, even those open to non-members.
Lessons Learned
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Iteration is important, even when you don’t have time.
As I conducted this case study within 10 days, I had little time to debrief and iterate on my research. I prioritized the design of the app to present at a competition. Looking back, I should have cut the fidelity of my mockups and done more wireframing, and laid out a stronger information hierarchy.
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Think beyond the design.
My proposal could have integrated more logistics plans. How do we develop this? What is the budget we’d request, as well as communications channels dedicated to integration? Stakeholder artifacts such as these would have strengthened my ideas.