Study Buddies:
We help you connect with your university peers.
My Role & Responsibilities:
UX Research
Ideation
Usability Testing
User Flow
Wireframing
UI Design
Prototyping
Other Members: Elisa Cuan, Jarin Tchicaya
Timeline: 3 Weeks
Finding a way to connect busy college students to their peers in a safe/comfortable way despite the obstacles of social distancing, online classes, etc.
Proto-Persona
Before conducting interviews, I built a proto-persona of the target audience that we were wanting to cater to.
UX Research
I conducted all five of the ux research interviews while my teammates took notes, and uncovered some interesting pain points that they had as students in the pandemic. The interviews also drove us to solving the studying problem many of them faced, both before and after COVID.
Our survey garnered 16 respondents, who shared with us their studying tendencies, including what they were comfortable with doing, the time they spent studying, and their use of technology while studying. Roughly 43% of students expressed that it was very helpful to study with someone else and about 56% who were willing to study with a stranger.
Persona
From the interviews and survey came the user persona, Ashton, a college student looking for study opportunities in a time when studying in person isn’t all that possible. I worked mostly on this with some help from my teammates.
Ideation
The storyboard was a key piece in our ideation process as it dictated the direction we were going to take the app. It was while writing this that we fully uncovered the troubles that someone like Ashton may face in a remote learning environment.
This storyboard translated well into the journey map that I created to really illustrate the pain points and where the app Study Buddies could step in and solve the problem of connecting students virtually in a safe environment.
My team did an ideation exercise known as “I Like, I Wish, What If” to brainstorm various aspects that we would want to include in the app. A lot of the top ideas after dot voting involved collaborative aspects for people to utilize.
User Flow
Building out and perfecting the user flow was an important part of making sure that before we started wireframing as a group, we had a general idea of what direction we were headed in and the kinds of actions that our user could do from screen to screen.
Wireframing/Prototyping
Here is a sample of the wireframes that were made before prototyping began, using the user flow to troubleshoot what would be on the prototype.
For the prototype we designed it in dark mode, since most of the users we tested with have their devices in dark mode. Messaging, file sharing and community were the three main pillars that we focused on through our prototyping process, as they were the most important things that our tested users brought up as useful aspects of studying.
User testing brought up some important detail points that were left out, such as a back button, resend code option and a progress bar for the onboarding frames. For the search frames above, it tweaked aspects of the search screen to make it more user friendly, such as adding in a “top” search results and removing the #’s to reduce confusion.