The Challenge
The University of Toronto had a total of 91,286 enrolled students in Fall 2018-19 and out of them, 16,828 were international students. A lot of them were new to Toronto who had left their family and friends to come here to study and aimed for a better future. The beginning of studies often comes with a change of environment and diminishing contact with family members and old friends. While this may provide many opportunities, it can also entail risks: being alone in a new environment (like Toronto) and not knowing anyone may lead to loneliness.
My Role
Working with my team, I was responsible for the user experience strategy, making sure that outcomes from each design stage aligned with our goals and research. I also created and mapped out the interactions for the prototypes and designed the medium-fidelity prototype.
Design journey
Research
User Persona
Ideation
Prototyping
Testing
Tried to understand the problem space and what our target users needed
Created a
profile that best represents our target users
Based on our user's needs and pain points, came up with ideas for the app
Picked the best ideas and designed the app, refining it using user inputs
Tested the effectiveness of the design with the help of our users
Research
Finding Direction
To find direction for our research, we started collecting some secondary data to understand the factors leading to loneliness in university students as well as the different support systems on campus.
From our findings, we decided to focus on student groups. This was due to the different options they provide in terms of support (a sense of community, organizational positions, events and activities) and their more accessible nature when compared to securing a meeting with a counsellor on campus.
Empathizing
Knowing our research goals, I set out to interview the undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto St. George campus.
My questions were focused on knowing more about their background, if they had any family and friends in Toronto, if they made any new friends on campus and how did they find them, do they feel socially connected, if they are part of any student groups or attend their events?
Along with interviews, we also sent out links to a survey to get more discrete, quick and measurable data.
By the end of our research session, we had 12 interviews and 40 survey responses, using that we were able to identify patterns and this is what we found.
Common Themes
For students who were part of student groups
It helped them explore interests
It helped them make friends from diverse cultures
For students who were not part of student groups
They were interested in joining
They couldn't find the time to join groups or attend events
Things they all had in common
They liked talking to someone when they felt stressed or depressed
Finding information about groups and events was difficult and time consuming
The experience of meeting new people at UofT needs to be improved
MEet Sameed Abadi
Sameed is a Master's student at the University of Toronto who wants to be more socially connected. He came to Toronto just a month before the start of his program with few of his friends. He likes to meet new people and make friends regardless of their backgrounds as long as their interests match. Being a busy student, Sameed also needs to manage his academics and find time to hangout.
Sameed Needs
To find like-minded people
To manage his studies
To make meaningful connections
Sameed's Current Journey
Joins UofT
Traveling all the way from the Middle East, Sameed thinks college will be fun. Filled with excitement to start school in a new country, Sameed starts exploring the campus and tries to make new friends.
Realization
Sameed soon realizes that even though he is meeting new people, their interests usually don't match and that results in him not making strong connections with them. He starts feeling isolated.
Figuring out the algorithm
Looking at his classmates forming new friend groups, Sameed turns to finding events hosted on campus in hopes of finding people that he would enjoy hanging out with.
Hurdles
Once he starts looking for groups and events on campus, Sameed realizes that finding information is difficult. It is spread across UofT's ULife and Clnx websites or on a student group's social media. Moreover, the events he manages to find don't usually fit in his busy schedule.
helping sameed
Based on what Sameed needed and the pain points identified during his current journey, we started ideating. To come up with my share of ideas I had to put myself in Sameed's shoes and imagine his problems and needs. I created a storyboard to help myself achieve that.
Using my storyboard, the needs, pain points and research, I started coming up with ideas along with my team for our future product and selected the ones that we agreed upon unanimously.
Hills
To provide us with design goals that would guide us to create a product that would solve the needs and problems we identified, we came up with these hills.
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Sameed can find relevant events with as little as one-time preference and schedule setup
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Sameed can make an informed decision about choosing & attending events without checking multiple sources
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Sameed can enjoy a good on-campus social life without affecting academics
campus social
Based on the ideas we selected and a well-defined set of hills, we started working on creating a prototype for an app. We came up with Campus Social, an event recommendation app that would take into consideration a student's schedule and preferences, informing them of any possible conflicts. It would also provide all the necessary information (like event reviews) for students to make an informed decision about registering for events.
We decided that "events" were the best avenue to warm up new students to the idea of joining/participating in student groups. The app would also allow them the ability to follow the student group hosting the event that they enjoyed and know more about them.
We started creating our low-fidelity sketches and I charted out all possible interactions that would be required (keeping students in mind) and added new screens accordingly. Once the sketches were ready, I created a sequential storyboard in order to provide a template for my team to conduct lean evaluations (testing the sketches and getting feedback from students).
From our initial testings, we received positive feedback from students about our efforts for keeping their schedule in mind, automatically updating it based on their registrations and recommending the events they would actually want to attend.
We also found areas of improvement in terms of what language we use (making it clearer), grouping elements together to better inform of their purpose, more notification options, etc.
Suggestions for new features included the integration of existing calendar apps to make it easier to add other busy times rather than manually adding them to the app and filters like free food.
Keeping all the feedback in mind, I iterated on the design for our app. The outcome was a medium-fidelity prototype made in Figma.
As I was working on the screens, I again created a new sequential storyboard to help inform me of all the possible interactions, using which I converted my screens into a clickable prototype.
Once the prototype was ready, we set out to test it.
Value proposition
We were aware that if the app were to be developed, we would have to compete with other event apps that were being currently used by many student groups and students. This is something we kept in mind during research and while designing Campus Social. This allowed us to accommodate needs specific to UofT students and student groups that some of the other apps like Eventbrite didn't address. Here are some key values that Campus Social provided over competitors.
One Platform for managing group information, events and payment without relying on ULife, CLNx and Facebook
Student Groups
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More exposure for the groups and their events that might have been otherwise missed by students
One Platform for finding group and event information without relying on ULife, CLNx and Facebook
Students
Keeps track of the class schedule for event recommendation and integrates external calendar apps
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No need for creating a new account as the app relies on student login for verification and scheduling
Testing
For our final testing, we selected a new group of students who were not aware of Campus Social, to get fresh feedback for the app and the new quality of life features added, and see if our changes alleviated the problems identified during the lo-fi testing.
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UofT graduate students
New to Toronto
Hectic daily schedule
Open to making friends
After our testing, these were our findings:
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The scheduling aspect of the app again got positive feedback
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Our users appreciated the thoughtful filter options we added
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The integration with external calendar apps was considered to be a time saver
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Users were confused regarding the location of past events.
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The language used in certain interactions was not clear
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Some users weren't sure if they would be able to set calendar and preferences later after skipping it initially
reflections
Working on this project made me realize how ambiguous a problem space can be, especially something like the increasing loneliness among university students. There were multiple ways we could have tried to tackle the issue, instead, we tried to narrow down on the most accessible ways we could help students feel less lonely. This helped me appreciate the help a little secondary research can provide in finding direction.
This project also helped me realize that people's opinion about the state of things can change, given you provide them with a good enough experience. During testing, some of my users were not so open about attending events due to various reasons but after trying out the app, they realized the value it could provide in their daily life and showed interest in using it.
If I had to do something differently, I would've gone for a larger and more diverse pool of users for the testing phases as it could've provided with more valuable insights. Given the time limit we had, I still believe that we got enough insights to improve our designs considerably.
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Thanks to my amazing team members
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Megha Singal
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Angela Cao
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Akriti Kaur
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Thanks to the creators of the icons used in this case study and app
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Icons made by Those Icons from www.flaticon.com
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Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com
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Icons made by Smashicons from www.flaticon.com
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Icons made by Linector from www.flaticon.com
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Icons made by Vitaly Gorbachev from www.flaticon.com
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