Student Community Platform
STUUNITY
Summary: In choosing a concept that would eventually become a fully designed platform, conceptualised from scratch. I was drawn to the idea of creating ‘something’ that will help students enrolled in GTA colleges/universities connect with their peers prior to and during the course of their program duration. The motivation was personal, I was an international student who had come to Toronto to pursue her passion of studying Business and Design. It was not long that I realized the only way to survive my student life was to connect with like-minded students.
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Table of Contents:
1. Comparative Analysis and User Research Survey
3. Personas and Journey Mapping
The Process:
Step 1: Comparative Analysis and User Research Survey
I enjoyed putting in my energies towards figuring out the Comparatives; which other platforms/apps students use to connect with other students in Toronto. This analysis served as a handy reference whenever I’d get stuck somewhere in the design process. Because I had already identified what the shortcomings of existing platforms were, I knew where my differentiation would lie.
Sending out screener surveys ensured I got direct responses from my target group. This came in as an early Proof of Concept for the platform when the students mentioned how a student-needs specific platform would help in their journeys.
Step 2: UX Theme and Mood Board
I wasn’t new to the concept of mood-boarding having worked in a web publication before. It’s always easier to put down one’s vision in the form of visual cues that can help provide some structure to the ideas being floated about a platform. More so, it was deciding on the UX Theme and Audience Takeaways that really pushed my project in a constructive yet open-ended way.
Step 3: Personas and Journey Mapping
I was extremely careful in getting my Persona Interviews from a mix of students who were International as well as Domestic so I could capture their specific needs. From what I gathered, students were looking for a personalised and customised way of connecting with others. They realised that if they were to use a platform for connecting, it has to be more than just filtering and finding connections. There had to exist a meaningful ecosystem around their needs. Thus, when I moved on to Journey Mapping I focused on the Pain Points and Happy Moments they’d experience while moving through this platform. As feedback from my mentor, I was told to define objective outcomes for the users; to be careful not to create something too broad, lest there are so many user needs that the platform can't meet any of them well!
Step 4: Draft Prototyping and User Testing
By now the project had gathered positive momentum from the time it had been conceptualized. I started expanding on my vision of how to facilitate connections while keeping users coming back to the platform. One of the first iterations of the platform just focused on getting user testing done on the basic or ‘hygiene’ tasks that a user would be able to accomplish. I felt the added layers of features and different user journeys would integrate better once ‘What the platform must definitely have’ was sorted. From then on I could move through from lo-fi to mid-fi in the project stage.
Step 5: Wireframe Annotations
Simulating a Systems development life cycle (SDLC) for my Student Community Platform was the mandate, and I didn’t realize how much I got into the whole process of planning, creating, testing, and sprinting through the stages of the Project. While working on the Annotated Wireframes, I could imagine barriers to communication with developers who may not interpret the same vision that a Designer may have had. Thus, describing everything down to the minutest details in the form of User Stories and then creating a Script for User Acceptance Testing was a whole skill in precision. It wasn’t as Abstract anymore, the project was taking shape.
Step 6: Project Management
I have to be candid in accepting Project Management on Projects doesn’t get me the most excited, however I am exceptionally good at it. And this time we were all Scrum Logging our entire projects in groups. Rightly so it became a well-oiled mechanism into not straying too far away from our goals. Since, the focus of the PM tools was to aid in the journey of the project I was working on, the timelines, the analysis charts and charters, the risk-assessment plans, etc. all guided the project vision further.
Step 7: Analytics and Dashboard
Identifying KPIs, Metrics for a totally abstract project was challenging in the beginning. Working on the Analytics Plan for Stuunity was a tiered process into fixing data points and metrics, visualising those data points and finally creating a Dashboard for the Project which would source information from the chosen metrics into patterns of behavior, use, traffic, performance etc. I could see myself doing this in the future as well, in full-time roles, as I really came to appreciate the Analytics methodology.
