The App to stay informed
OverView
It is confusing to get around campus knowing where different events are, knowing which paths or roads are blocked, and most GPS apps only show a general view. It's important to fix this problem to prevent students from missing out, showing up to class late, and feeling included in on-campus events. Most college students, primarily in their first or second year, suffer from navigating around in-person classes. This gives us a fairly narrow age range, but a consistent issue that needs to be fixed. When college students who are new on campus face this problem, it lowers their morale, and ability to show up to class on time, ultimately hurting their chances of succeeding.
Roles
Research, Wireframing, Lo-fi Prototyping, Hi-fi Prototyping, Product Design
TimeLine
9 weeks
The Problem
College campuses are very difficult to navigate when you are new. Colleges also are not very informative to the students about what goes on around campus and can leave some students feeling left out. This app solves those issues by having a real-time update on what is happening around campus with descriptions and how to navigate to any location taking the most used paths and shortcuts.
Research
We asked these questions to find how students felt about their campus/schools, if they felt connected or "in the loop" with what's happening around campus and if they wanted to be more informed.
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The questions we asked during the research revolved around judging whether or not out target audience had a use for our app. Who exactly our competitors would be, what features they would like to see, and if there is any potential for possible sponsorships with colleges that showed a more prominent need. To find answers to some of these problems, we asked questions that would give us information on what technology or app our target audience uses to navigate around campus and how we could differentiate from those other apps and potentially be of better use in the college environment.
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To get this information we asked questions such as, "Where do you go to school?". "Do you find navigating around campus difficult?". "What apps do you currently use to navigate around?". and "Where do you current find events on campus?". This helped us narrow down which features would actually be necessary for a minimum viable product.
Design Process
User Persona
User flow
Before creating wireframes we needed a birds eye view of the flow of the app
Sketches
Physical Prototype
Mid-Fi Designs
Hi-Fi Designs
Loading Screen
Login Screen
Home Page
Add to Map
Search
Navigation View
Navigation Pull down
Side Menu
Events View
Add Hazard
Add Event
Event Clicked
Hazard Clicked
Hazard Reported enroute
Usability Test
In our testing, we targeted college students, our target audience. They believed the UI was easy to read, understand, and navigate the app. Our most positive feedback from multiple testers was how navigating the app was easy to follow and understand, as well as how intuitive our search functionality was. The criticism was about the event pop-up feature and how it would get somewhat annoying to search with pop-ups appearing, if they were frequent. Even with the criticism, this feature tested 4 out of 5 starswith our testers. The testers believed the app had a modern look and feel, and thought the colors complimented the app. Some more criticism was given with the squares and sharp edges of our app. Testers believed if we removed them or even rounded the edges, the aesthetics would improve and have more of a modern feel. Testers also disliked that they were thrown into the home page without any tutorial pop-ups of what there is to do or the other functions of the app.
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Testers also gave feedback on the accessibility features they wanted to see such as colorblind settings and a text-to-speech function to make it easier to use while driving. Testers also wanted to see social features such as the ability to see other users' profiles, a friends list, and other social features to warrant having an account and profile. One of the testers even mentioned, "You could use this app to get around campus and meet people". Testers liked how easy the ability to add events/hazards to the map is.
Some testers said it felt like a social network, a user-run app. Another tester believed the app felt like an iteration on older technology, They said this because GPS-type apps have been seen before, but what made this one different and more current was the social feature and interactable components. Lastly, we received feedback on notification pop-ups, the testers did not want to get bombarded with event/hazard notifications. All in all, our testers were very satisfied with the app although they did list some improvements we could make. A particular tester's final comment was that they wished this app was real so they could use it to get around campus and stay in the loop on what goes on at school.
Improvements
1. Improved social features through an added Bio and dedicated social button to view others profiles
2. Improved Logo
3. Added visual for time to destination bubble
4. Separate markers for destination vs user
5. The alert menu shows all the school and when setting a destination, it now shows an alert pop up if there's one in the way
6. Added severity filter
7. Slight change in color palette to improve contrast
8. Slightly more rounded corners of UI elements
What's Next?
With this split of the project we focused on research, prototyping, and a general HI-FI prototype as the cap to the split. If we were to continue with this project onto the next split, we would spend more time testing (usability and general assembly), improve our HI-FI, and then start coding a working copy of the app using the planned HI-FI prototype.
Takeaways
We learned through first hand experience of creating an app. Researching issues and creating potential solutions for those problems. Creating a user persona based off the ideal user we are creating the app for, interviewing people to understand key features they would like to see and find any questions or concerns with the idea and ideating off of that. Creating prototypes, testing, and making improvements based on the tests. And learning how to deliver a finished product. Overall this was a tremendous learning experience creating an app from start to finish.
Creators
