Student event app
case study

New students on university often experience loneliness and difficulty to form new relationships due to the new environment.

Mobile app, that would alow students to find events on campus so they can join them, and that way meet other students and form potential friendships.

As a first step, I tried to identify our main user persona. While I didn't have an access to any specific surveys, I collected a small amount of data from forum on Reddit.

I found out, that a few students (especially introverts) found themselves to be very lonely once they started to study on university. Their preffered way to form new connections was via events, sport games and etc. (as they claimed, there is no social "pressure" on them when doing this activities).

So here we have our imaginary persona Michael, that represents our ideal user. This helped me a lot when doing certain decisions.

For example: On the main app screen you can see that I added a section with events that are happening TOMORROW. But why? Well, students are busy - and they don't want to make a commitment weeks / months down the road. There is MUCH LESS friction with commitment for next day since they know already if they have time. We could also change it maybe for "Events this week".

Once I had a user persona and a broad idea in my head about the app, I moved on creating User flow diagram.

User flow diagram is primarily used by UX teams. They basically do this in order to figure out the flow of the user on the app / website, in order to present the user with most reasonable options and information.

Here on the right side, you can see a very basic diagram starting with user opening the app. Final step is joining the event.

While there could be many more diagrams and steps - I kept it really simple.

Another step was to create a very low fidelity prototype.

I also like to keep it "old school" and use pencil with sticky notes - and then turn it into interactive design file inside of Figma.

In the 1# image you can see I brainstormed and sketched various layouts.

Then, I cut out the ones I think are great (see 2# image). Also, as I'm sketching, I get all sorts of ideas which I write on sticky notes. It's really helpful.

You see.. The main goal of lo-fi prototypes is to translate high-level design concepts into some form of digestible format, so the team can check and test functionality rather than the visual appearance of the product. That's why WE ARE NOT paying attention to details such as shadows, colors, fonts and etc. All of that is important, just not in this step.

You will see in the next step, that we add a lot of stuff that's not even in the initial prototype - which is always the case.

One of the last steps is taking the feedback and data from lo-fi testing, and applying new learnings on High fidelity prototype.

This hi-fi prototype now has most of the details that final product will have when team agrees to ship it.

As you might already know, lo-fi doesn't only apply to design. It also applys to content and interaction. That's why we now see a better-designed prototype with more functionality and content.

Since this was only my design concept, I am not able to really test this prototype. 

I ended up using my common sense and my "UX-EMPATHY".

That's the biggest problem since as a UX designer I have to make decisions according data, user feedback and surveys - instead of the feeling.

But in the end, I'm really happy on what product I created.