EduVent
A school event application that will assist students on finding and participating in their favoured activities as well as meet new people with similar interests.
Project Overview
Roles
User Research, User Testing, Prototyping
Duration
4 months
Tools
Figma, Google Surveys, Canva
Team
Clara Mendiola, Farizah Naeem, Isabel Uribe Perez
During the fall term of 2022, our team members were instructed to build an interface that can ease the stress of university and college students throughout the semester.
After a tremendous amount of brainstorming, our group wanted to conduct an stress-easing application that can assist students with finding information about school events. This will help users with balancing their hectic schedule with schoolwork and extracurricular activities. Thus, easing our target audiences stress levels regarding event involvement.
Emphasize
Primary Research
Our team conducted user-centric research to determine what our target audience, university and college students, seek when it comes to joining events and how we can implement empathy towards their goals through our design.
Primary internet research revealed that media consumption has increased among our users and tend to use social media to collect information. Therefore, our team decided on creating an event app where users can view details regarding school activities.
Study conducted by Vividata on how students consume data after the pandemic; social media increased the most
User Research
User Interviews
Our team conducted interviews to directly ask users what their goals are when it comes to finding out about events and how they presently find out events as well as how important school activity involvement is for them.
For our interviews, we asked what users liked and disliked about how they get informed about events.
What participants liked:
Users found it easily accessible to collect information about events through school emails, social media posts, and contacting other students for event information.
What participants disliked:
Users would only be informed once about an event, being spammed with unwanted event information on various platforms, and never notified when they happen.
Surveys
These were the following surveys we asked our target audience to collect more user-centric insight:
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Social media
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Calendar
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72.2% voted over a 2 (out of 5)
Survey Results
In conclusion, our group was able to determine the following information about our users from our performed surveys:
Envisioning User Needs
After conducting primary and user research, our group was able to create user personas, journey maps, and empathy maps to correctly profile our target audience for our application.
Our group learned through our previous research that our users wish to have one platform where they can find information and be notified when they are going to happen.
User personas represents our users and how we should make design decisions accordingly.
Journey maps guided us through our users journey while using the application to find events of interests.
Empathy maps helped us gain better insight into our users such as their pain points and goals in order to solidify our users needs as well as aid in their decision making.
Define
User Problem Statement
“University and college students are very busy with various commitments. Therefore, it’s difficult for them to go out of their way to find event information or keep informed about upcoming events they'd like to engage in because there is not a singular platform that can help notify them.”
Information about events are scattered across different platforms such as emails, university or college social media accounts, and more.
These platforms fail to facilitate student personalization of announcements or timely notification of events tailored to their interests. Instead, they provide one-time notifications, leaving students solely responsible for staying informed thereafter.
User Approaches
Our group decided to perform the following approaches: Point of View and the 5-Whys approaches. Our application is designed to resonate and satisfy our audience's needs regarding school events.
We ensured our users' needs represented our main app functions to easily find event information on one platform, save events of interest, and notify users before events happen. This overall helped us define our next steps for our ideation phase of the design process.
Point of View (POV) Approach
Five-Whys Approach
Ideate
Crazy 8 Method
Our group used the Crazy 8 Method to rapidly come up with various ideas in order to determine what each screen will look like within our 1st prototype.
Each team member completed 8 different ideas in 8 minutes then compare them.
Farizah
Clara
Isabel
Natalia
Crazy 8 Results
Each member of the group participated in post-it voting in order to collect all the relevant design ideas for our application then establish our first prototype.
In conclusion, we chose an amalgamation of everyone's best ideas to incorporate into the low-fidelity prototype.
Prototype
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Once our user research was conducted, we were able to create ur first iteration of our design solution.
Our team successfully crafted a low-fidelity prototype for our application, enabling users to swiftly discover upcoming events and seamlessly integrate them into their calendars.
Testing: Cognitive Walkthroughs
Our team tested on fellow university and college students to perform the following 4 tasks for our cognitive walkthroughs:
Make an account
To place an event into the application calendar
To find the news section on the application
Start off on the homepage and navigate through the icons that have not been used
Youtube video of our EduVent Cognitive Walkthroughs
