Have you ever joined a student club but realized it was not the right one for you?
We create a solution that could help every university students find their Dream Club
UClub
Overview
UClub is a mobile application designed to help students find a club by giving their best club choice, complete and up-to-date information and peer support.
This was created as our INF 1602 course project collaborated with UofT's Innovation Hub, with the objective being to come up with an idea to solve for the domain "Clubs".
This project was conducted by INF 1602-PRA0105 Group 1 with members of Jinghao Xiao, Xiaying Chen, Wei Wang, Jiayuan Guo and Jinhang Luo.
Oct-Dec 2022
Research phase
My role: Research studio lead, designed questionnaires, conducted interview and background research
As a university student, I understood how difficult it was to get involved in a community with which I had zero connection. First, I validated these problems with my teammates. After conducting secondary research, we found that UofT's existing services (Clubs Help Desk & Student Organization Portal) are designed more toward the leadership team. These resources fail to address regular student needs, such as getting to know different student clubs, signing up for student clubs, and engaging in student club activities.
I lead our team walk through the initial steps which include
Identify problems and user groups
Brainstorm questionnaire and interview questions
Defined inclusion criteria and conducted semi-structured interviews
Problem statement
After gathering raw data from both questionnaire and interview, our group find that is not easy for newcomers to find useful information about the clubs because:
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Existing services failed to address student needs
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No available help and advice provided while knowing a club
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Collecting information about a club is time consuming
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Time devotion is not matched with students' expectation
User persona
Based on our research, our group identified that there were two user types which are freshman who are interested join in a club and active club participants. We decided first user group will be our primary focus and there have three reasons why we made that decision:
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Our problem space is focusing on building a student club experience by providing the "right" information and providing it "right" .
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Through our research, the biggest issue that existing club members experienced was they did not choose a club that they love to engage in at the first place.
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We cannot change any elements of the student club itself due to each club's dynamics.
Meet our persona: Bob the freshman
As-is scenario for Bob
Imagine if we keep everything as it is, the journey of Bob joining a club will be like:
Our group decided to design our prototype based on Bob's journey and solve all the pain points he had without changing club itself.
Ideation phase
My role: Generate and design ideas of Club 23 And Me, Experience sharing forum, Radar Chart, and sketch these ideas
I conducted team meetings with my team to brainstorming ideas focusing on the following domains
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Ideas offering advice and help
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Ideas of better understanding
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Ideas about shared interest
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Ideas of notification
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Ideas of experience
In the ideation phase, I assist our ideation studio lead by providing insightful ideas based on our persona's pain points, sketching them, and presenting them to stakeholders. I also revolve these ideas into actual features that could implement into our prototype. After ideas were grouped and clustered, our group started to prioritize our ideas by voting based on their feasibility and impact.
Since the club experience sharing forum and Club 23AndMe have the highest vote of feasibility and impact, we will mainly translate these two ideas into features. Since asking everybody and sharing forums have similar functionality. Hobby tag could work as a system features to allow users to see each others profile, so we decided to involve ideas of a student radar chart, and clock ticking alarm to address users pain points
Club 23 and Me
Like 23 and Me, take the test to find the best matches
Experience sharing forum
Join the forum to engage with current club members
Clock ticking alarm
Alarm will ring our when an events coming soon
Student radar chart
A chart to give users better visualization of different attributes in an organization
Defining the MVP
My role: Designed search system in the prototype and implemented idea student radar chart into the feature and mapped out the user flow by drawing the storyboard
I conducted group meetings of workshop and sketching session with the team to map out our user flow and come up with the storyboard to capture the MVP
We identified the following key features based on our ideas:
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A test to help users find the "one". User can take the test on the home page of the app after onboard, the test will generate result of the best match along with other possibilities based on students' profile, interests, time availability.
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Club experience sharing forum. A platform allowing club members to post content related to their student club and others can interact under the posts.
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A radar chart. Club members can rate based on the attributes shown on the chart. And students can use the chart to get a better visualization of the various aspect of the club with less time. The attributes on the chart will not define the quality of a club but only reflect students' needs and preferences.
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Notification and scheduling. Works as a side feature to assist student club searching process, it can track students' favourite clubs when the audition or new updates happen on their favourite clubs.
Our design goal
Future UofT club members can discover suitable student club by review the characteristics of a club at one glance.
Future UofT club members learn more detail about clubs without becoming a club member
Future UofT club members can find student clubs that match their interests and be provided with other options that they might not have considered before.
To-be scenario for Bob
After we implement our solutions, Bob's journey will change from joined a student club that did not match his expectation to joined his dream club.
Prototyping phase
My role: Assist studio lead to design clickable prototype by Figma, Led design of search system workflow from search to club information page, define design goals and conducted user testing and revise prototype based on feedback and findings
For the design, I wanted new students to feel welcome and supported by using our app. So in every step of user flows, we highlight tasks that could encourage engagement and always reassure users that they are making the "right" decision and give them a sense of confidence.
Home page
We highlighted the test to encourage students to take it and find their best available club choices. The home page can also navigate to all other features which include explore, schedule and forum.
Test result page
The test result page can explain why this club could be your best fit. Other possibilities also provided to match our design goal .
Explore page
I designed an exploring page to allow users could search for the clubs in mind or browse each club's recent activities. The search system is a three-step work flow from search to search results to club information. Students also can filter their choices on the search result page.
Club info page
I decide to implement the club radar chart at the most attractive position on a club info page, so students can review each attribute of a student club with one glance, which saves their time and effort. I made a few revisions based on our low-fidelity prototype
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Changed the name of each corner on radar chart for better address students situations
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Added explanation tooltips to provide a clearer sense
Forum page
The forum page follows the same design concept as explore page. Users can view their favorite/latest/trending clubs' posts and search any club's experience forum.
Discussion forum page
Students can view any searched club's posts and interact under the comment section. After we conducted the lean evaluation, we changed the forum's features from chatting to sharing. And students can learn any inside information about a club without joining one.
Notification and scheduling
After users favourited any clubs, they will automatically track these clubs' updating information which includes posts, activities, and recruitments.
Notification detail page
Users can view who is going to an audition which can trigger their interest. Users also have the freedom to turn off the notification or simply click not the interested button.
Evaluation and next steps
My role: Define research questions, conduct usability testing, Evaluate, analyze, interpret and present the data
After our group designed the prototype, we started using observation and interviews to conduct usability testing. I ran two usability tests and analyzed all our group's available data for insights on helping us improve our app. And defined the following research questions based on our design goals.
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Can users review all the context of a student club within one page?
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Is the test helping users find the club that matches their hobbies/interests?
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Can user discover a new hobby they never thought of before?
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How much support can users get from the discussion forum?
Achieved goals
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Participants have no problem finding the club and forum they want to search for and can easily find where to take the test.
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All users reflect our test design was learnable, efficient and accessible.
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All users reflect our app could be a great tool for helping them find a club that they love to engage in.
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Most of the users think the radar chart is useful in helping them find the club that they love to engage in one glance.
What we need to be improved
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Since one of our design goals mentioned that we hope students can find new hobbies through our solution, we will redistribute the layout, so the feature-related (Other possibilities) is prioritized.
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Based on the feedback, we will add the “confirmation” button on the test page in order to make users double-check the answer they choose.
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We will also add the “see your results here” button on the result page to make it convenient for users to find their test results.
Takeaways
Our group was short of one member, so we had to redistribute our work and take more hats on ourselves. Some of the tasks had a steep learning curve, so it was an eye-opening experience to manage myself, starting from researching to building a prototype that could change a university student's life.
Some key takeaways from the project are:
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Make usability testing and revision as your daily routine when designing.
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Design concept was built from a clear problem statement.
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The best design come from collaboration