Extracurricular activities play a huge role in the collegiate experience - not only does it help students meet new people, but support the development of skills that would otherwise be difficult in the classroom.
However, with over 800 clubs and student-run organizations at the University of Toronto, the
sheer amount of event information can be daunting. Furthermore, initial research has shown that UofT has no centralized platform for extracurriculars, making
it difficult for students to find specific events or activities that fits their interests. Thus, our team set out to find out:
Are there pain points related to participating in extracurriculars, and how can we help improve this process?
3 months from Oct-Dec 2018
Mobile App (Android)
UX Design and Research
Sharon Lam, Victoria Ho, Jessica Yao
Figma, InVision, Google Surveys
Competitive Analysis, Interviews, Surveys, Personas,
Prioritization Grid
To get a comprehensive understanding of the connection between university students and extracurricular involvement, we looked into secondary resources and conducted competitive analysis on existing apps and services relating to students and extracurriculars.
In order to dive deeper into user needs, we recruited and conducted interviews with representative users to understand their event finding behaviour, motivations for attending events, and factors affecting event attendance. We also distributed surveys online and paper surveys randomly on campus.
We had a lot of data from the secondary and primary research we conducted, and needed to find common patterns and establish key themes to focus on. We decided to take all the research points into sticky notes, so it'll be easier for us to visualize and group similar themes together. We created the affinity diagram below to visualize common themes we found.
From the affinity diagram, we were able to establish the following themes from our research:
Using our primary research data, we developed a persona of our representative user, Sam, to describe her needs, behaviours, goals and pain points. We also created an as-is scenario to outline how she currently looks for university events and to identify pain points.
Based on our research, we believe there is a gap between what is available for students and their expectations.
Students would like to be involved but are unable to find events efficiently. Even if they did find an event, they may not
get a positive experience if they feel awkward going alone.
With sticky notes in hand, we let our creativity flow and brainstormed lots of ideas based on users' needs and pain points established. For fun, we also came up with some ideas that were a bit more absurd, i.e. a sorting hat that finds events for you!
We
voted our ideas based on feasibility and impact, and mapped it on a prioritization grid to see which ideas scored the highest.
To keep our scope focused, we took ideas that scored the highest and narrowed it down to
3 feature-based goals for our design:
With the 3 goals in mind, we created low-fidelity mockups of our initial design, then conducted lean evaluation tests with a few representative users. We asked them to 'think-aloud' on what they thought about the features and layout of the design, to figure out whether we're on the right path with these designs, and to identify any fundamental usability issues before moving on to the next step.
We used the feedback from our lean evaluation testing to improve the designs for our medium fidelity mockups. We created the designs on Figma and developed a clickable prototype using InVision. Click here for our clickable prototype.
Example Workflow: Searching for event, confirming attendance and pairing up with an event buddy
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In order to evaluate our designs and uncover further opportunities for improvement,
we designed 3 tasks based on the 3 goals established earlier, and conducted tests with a few representative users.
We also conducted post-test interviews to learn more about what they thought and experienced with the design.
After the tests, we compiled our users' feedback and drew key points to inform our next steps, as outlined below.
Since this is a course project, we realize our design has real-life limitations. We would need to conduct stakeholder interviews, e.g. developers, UofT event organizers, to better understand the feasibility of the app, particularly its technical feasibility. We would also need to increase and diversify the sample size of our participants to get a comprehensive understanding of our representative users.
Based on our usability test results, focusing on making changes to the home, event buddy information and confirmed attendance screen would be our next steps.
