Project Background

The UW Event Tracker mobile app was an eight week project I completed for a Design Thinking class (INFO 360) at the University of Washington. The goal of the project was to increase student awareness of on-campus events at the University of Washington and to make their experience of finding on-campus events easier and more efficient.

Process

Personas

We created two personas to design for: Jake, a college freshman, and Monica, a transfer student who is new to the United States. Both are new to the campus and want to attend more events to meet people.

Research Questions

After creating personas, we came up with three questions to guide our user research:

1. What is the level of student satisfaction with their participation on campus?
2. How can we increase student awareness and involvement of events on campus?
3. How can we improve students' event finding experience?

Surveys & Interviews

Next, we conducted contextual interviews with four University of Washington students and surveyed 50 others. Based on the results from our interviews and surveys, we put together a list of the top five frustrations students had regarding finding out about events on campus:

1. Email notifications are too much
• Even though email notifications are a good way to find out about events, the amount that students get are overwhelming. It is especially difficult to sift through emails to find events that truly interest you.
2. Lack of personalization
• It's hard to find events that truly matter to the user. Those who we interviewed wanted to find events that interest them.
• One interviewee thought that there was a lack of advertisement of events she wanted to go to (arts/music) and there were more advertisement of sport events.
3. The events are not consolidated in one place
• There are different ways to find events (posters, Facebook, emails, word of mouth, etc). It's hard to keep track of all them.
• Having them consolidated in one place will help students find events before hand and help them coordinate with their schedule instead of finding out about the event later.
4. There was a frustration of constantly checking websites instead of having the information come to the students.
• Because the information is so scattered, students would have to constantly check different websites for events.
5. One of the things we found important was creating a resource for students that can help them transition to the college life.
• For example, first year students might find all the events on campus overwhelming. There are a lot of resources available to students and it's hard to find something they might be really interested in.

Wireframes

After completing our user research, we created wireframes of a potential design for the application.

Paper Prototype & Usability Testing

After completing the wireframes, we created a paper prototype of the application and conducted usability tests.

Notable findings:

• Participants were easily able to find an event and add it to their calendar.
• Participants were also easily able to remove an event from their calendar.
• One participant thought that we should have a way to view their events in calendar form.
• Some of the features weren’t intuitive.
• On the “Featured” page, one participant kept tapping on the image because they didn’t realize you have to click the “Details” button to get more information about the event.
• Also, some participants weren’t aware at first that you could swipe left and right on the home page.
• Lastly, for the random event spinner, one participant didn’t realize you had to click on the events’ name in order to access the details.

Hi-Fi Prototype

For the last step, we created a hi-fidelity prototype of the application:

Results

We received positive feedback from the class and the instructor and completed the assignment with 47/50 points.