Connect U : First Mobile App Design
Big Idea
What my job was to create an app mock-up that made it easier to connect with friends and fellow classmates in school without a lot of contact with teachers. The app only needs a school email to join as well as which school they were a part or and it needed to cater to teen interests and their success in school
Research
For my research, I conducted interviews with three people, one boy and two girls who were just beginning high school and one was in their last year of middle school. Throughout the videos, there was a common mood among the people that I interviewed. Overall most of them had good productivity due to having plenty of time to accomplish work while being at home all day. Some differences I noticed were that some were seeing a couple of friends once or twice a month or hanging out with one person from time to time. Overall, they felt alienated when it came to Zoom calls when they could not speak with people, specifically in breakout rooms where classmates fell silent. The interviewees all wanted a way to be more talkative with classmates and have a way to convey their free time to their friends and also the activities that they could do and were interested in to make new friends.
Persona
After conducting my interviews, I created a persona on which to base my app. This was the first persona I ever created and it was to encompass what I learned from the interviews and who the standard person I was marketing to would be.
Design Tenets
“Collaborate with your classmates during covid!”
“Make new friends in school”
Connecting with classmates
“Find new people with similar interests”
“Join groups tailored to your classes”
“Find new hobbies with new people”
Connecting through interests
Making sure they know not much teacher interaction on the app
“Student Only space”
“School without the teachers”
Sketching First Draft
Workflow: Version One
Design Iteration
My next step in my design process was to go back to some of the people I interviewed before and show them my mock ups and ask for their user input. I asked them to do varying tasks that went through the application and show me what they were doing and where they got lost along the way. After the interviews I conducted, I took those design aspects that people struggled with and changed them within my application.
Some of the things that people struggled with were adding an event without having to go through all the hoops of clicking on the day and pressing the plus sign, instead I also added another way a person could add an event with drop down menus so the person could enter the day without having to go through more than 2 steps. Another thing I noticed missing from my profile creation pages is that there was no way for the person to complete their profile and then move on to the Home Screen. So after hearing that I created a complete button for people to use that made sure they knew their profile was done. I also added some icons to give hints if a person wanted to change their profile photo or anything on their profile after it had been completed so the user knew they could go back and edit anything if anything changed. I also changed some of the color layout to make it more lively so it was not super dull and dark.
