We began this project very early in our college careers which is why the topic of finding out details of universities was so fresh in our minds. Our question that led to the creation of ComUni was, "Do students have a place to openly share about their university?". With this in mind, we started the process of trying to undersand how students currently share their thoughts, ask questions, and retrieve necessary information from their school. During the 8 weeks we identified our potential stakeholders, spoke to possible users for research and testing, anaylzed our findings, and created our product.
In order to properly create this product, we utilized Alan Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design process. This tool is pivotal in the design world and it is necessary to create successful designs centered around users. To further explain this process, I will analyze and explain the first four phases of Alan Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design process.
Students are having a difficult time connecting with others and sharing their experiences.
Creating a product that allows students to share their university experience, connect with others, and gain necessary information from the school.
During the research phase, our teams goal was to gain insight on how students currently obtain and share information pertaining to their university.
We completed a literature review in order to help expand our knowledge of our main topic. This review was guided by the question,"What do we need to know to effectively design ComUni?" This led to the creation of many questions to help us narrow our focus. We learned from this research that the majority of students use social media to gain information and students have different experiences which will alter what type of information one is seeking.
We found that there were many different applications that have similar features to the product we wanted to create such as Reddit, RateMyProfessor, Niche, and GroupMe. While none of them are directly comparable to what we believed our product would be, we analyzed the features of each that we thought might be incorporated into ours.
Alan Cooper highlights the important role that interviewing potential users has. As we continued in this first phase, we had a goal to learn about how our app fits into the lives of current and prospective college students. Due to time constraints, we selected our participants by contacting current and prospective students we knew rather than using a random sampling. We ended up speaking to five students ranging from seniors in highschool all the way to graduate students. Through this research, we discovered that our users prefer to get information from other students or use social media, find the university websites to be difficult to navigate, and they wanted the app to focus on different amenities the campus has.
Following each interview, we collected our findings on an affinity map. This allowed us to see patterns and really gage our users needs and interests.
After synthsizing our findings, we created our primary persona, Melody Soto. She was made as a result of viewing trends in our data and represents our main group of users - students.
We began making a list of all the things we need in our app based on our persona, Melody Soto. This is a list of all the features required to satisfy her.
We began our design process by creating low fidelity wireframes that would give us a basis of what the users need. This basic frames helped us figure out the proper sizing and spacing we needed to create our prototype.
We then brought these frames into Figma and began making them high-fidelity. We created a design system that helped the team stay consistent in what sizes, colors, and fonts we should be using.
Each team member took a different section of the app to work on and when the work was completed, we'd collaborate and make changes as a group. My main focus was working on the rankings and the chat features but all members ended up working on a bit of everything.
In the end, we had a fully functioning prototype that we believed encapsulated all of Melody's needs and wants. In order to confirm this, we conducted usability testing. We spoke to the same participants as our research interviews and the feedback was mainly positive so our team had very minimal changes to make.
Our final prototype was complete with an onboarding section that used 2-factor authentication, a home page to view the community, and events section to view upcoming events at universities, a place to view/leave ratings, a chat section to connect with university administration, and a profile page where you can view posts, comments, badges, and change any settings.
This was my first experience using the Goal-Directed Design Process as well as working on a product end-to-end with a group. Overall, it was a great learning experience and taught me how to work together on a team, conduct interviews, work with a design system, and be open to change. Due to the time constraints, I feel that there were things that my team did not get to do as well as we would have liked. If I had more time, I would have wanted to spend more time on the research section and talked to more users as well as a more random group. I also think it would have been beneficial to talk to univeristy workers to hear their thoughts on a product like this and if they find if it would be helpful or harmful to their works stream. Despite our inability to conduct additional research, we got an immense amount of data from the participants we had and created something great together.