Case Study

We were originally charged with building a technology that would improve our lifestyles. There are plenty of personal icks we encounter in the world. As designers and developers, we often immediately begin thinking of ways to solve them with a new system or a small improvement to the old one.

Students at the University of Georgia are forced to interact with a host of different apps and mediums daily just to be successful. Athena starts our quest, but it can only solve a handful of problems, mostly dealing with registration. We have Outlook for our emails, separate platforms for our student accounts and financial aid, Slack for our course/department communications, and eLC for our course content. The best way to keep track of textbooks is to bookmark them in your browser or always have a browser of tabs in your desktop back pocket.

How does this experience differ for online students versus in-person students? What about undergraduate students versus graduate students? What about traditional versus non-traditional students? Where are the opportunities for social interaction among students? How can online students stay in-the-know of campus activities? How might campus clubs/orgs/groups promote events to the masses? How does UGA inspire/drive productivity among students academically every day? Is there a way to integrate mental health services, tech information, and general campus resources? Now, let's get sprinting.

We used a sprint-style project management map to guide our ideation. I oversaw our team's journey as the Facilitator.

Our first step was identifying & simplifying our problem: How can we create a social app that will engage online students with their connections (class, software, organization, etc)? From there, we began thinking of long-term goals individually for the application. We voted on the goals that we felt best encompassed our general goal and landed on "a one-stop shop". This would guide our ideation.

We mapped our potential challenges we may face while accomplishing our goal. Will too many features overwhelm and hinder students from use? It’s just another app for a student to download... how can we leverage our app to be the one students turn to first? Most importantly, will we even be able to really improve the overall experiences of students?

With these in mind, we thought of ways to tackle this project. We created personas in order to ensure we were always maintaining a user-centric approach. We used these personas to create a plethora of "How Might We...?" questions so that we could ideate features that would fit multiple lifestyles AND accomplish our "one-stop-shop" goal. We also created journey maps for general users of the app (students, faculty, advisors) so we could imagine how our app could perform in the real world and inject itself into the University's system.

Now, it was time to prototype! We started with lightening demos (sharing inspiration from our favorite apps & systems). Then, we each sketched our versions of a homepage, navigation system, and calendar or to-do list screen. We shared our skectches and agreed on a universal vision that unified all of our stylistic ideas. We used Figma to design a prototype for testing.

We capped our project with a successful phase of user testing. We gathered five subjects of varying lifestyles to navigate through the features of our app and share their observations/concerns. They each agreed that our application would simplify the student experience and it housed everything a student would need to prosper in a University environment without being too cluttered thanks to excellent navigation.

We found our greatest win was in our social features. Every subject praised our inclusion of a social networking screen, noting the value of students' ability to connect with each other and be involved on campus so easily. One subject (Black female in her 20s) even shared how having this application could have directly improved her experience in college as isolation caused her to eventually drop out.

The subjects raved about our calendar/to-do-list system, specifically our implementation of incentives like rewards and points. One subject (White female in her 40s) felt "encouraged" by our progress tracker and said she would "definitely use this feature the most".

In all, we left this project feeling very satisfied with our prototype and the features we built. With all of the useful feedback we received from testing, we were more than inspired and motivated to continue improving 'Hey Dawg!'.