Role
Project Lead (team of 3)
Date
September 2021
Timeframe
10 weeks
Objective
Connect students and professors after the pandemic
Project Overview
My team’s goals:
- Create a platform for professors to help students navigate their college careers.
- Give students the tools to feel comfortable reaching out to professors.
Initial research:
- Three semi-structured interviews and competitive analysis.
Insights:
- Professors look for increased interactivity outside of class time and look forward to meeting with students.
- Verbal communication is more engaging and effective than written communication.
- Students and professors are interested in an app that enables students to reach out to professors.
- MeetMe should give students the option to speak privately with professors about concerns.
Personas
Following our research, we created two personas to identify the needs, pain points, and motivation of our users.
Emily – a student who is intimidated to reach out to her professor.
Michael – a professor who struggles to interact with his students outside of the classroom.
User Journey Map
Next, our team created a user journey map for Michael to visualize how his working environment affected his actions and emotional response levels (frustration, confidence, and energy) during a typical day working as a professor.
This allowed us to understand what we were specifically designing for — our four design requirements.
Design Requirements
1. Increase student-professor interaction after class.
2. Provide a platform for quickly scheduling after-class meetings on a phone.
3. Compile the services offered by professors in a single platform.
4. Enable professors to share their knowledge with students.
Storyboards
With a clearer understanding of the design requirements of our product, we created storyboards to illustrate our personas using our product in various scenarios.
Through this, we were able to explore different options for design solutions, initiating the ideation process for our app.
Information Architecture
At this stage, we broke down the high-level and low-level pages in our application, creating a flow chart to visualize the high-level hierarchy of the screens of the MeetMe app. This allowed us to refine the different components and user flows of the entire system.
Low Fidelity Prototype
With our information architecture in hand, we developed our lo-fi prototype, with the purpose of:
- Determining how a user might interact with the contents and information in our application.
- Testing design ideas while still being flexible with changes
- Understanding what the final product might resemble.
Quick Evaluations and Wireframes
After creating the low fidelity prototype, we tested it with new users — observing their interactions with the product as they completed certain tasks, and interviewing them to understand their experience. We then synthesized our findings in a report to reference as we continued developing our app.
We also created annotated wireframes to showcase our full system. This involved:
- Considering the functionality of each page as well as a rationale for signficant design decisions.
- Creating diagrams that illustrated the most important interactions that a user would have with the product.
High Fidelity Prototype
Finally, after consolidating all of these insights, our team created a hi-fi prototype. This was a clickable demo of the final state of the product and included a complete user experience.
We used the feedback from quick evaluations to make our application:
- Accessible and easily understood.
- Polished and aesthetic.
- Highly detailed, with clear UI affordances.