A space for students to find and collaborate with other students on personal projects.
WHAT I DID
SKILLS
Product Design
UX Design
UI Design
This application was initially developed as a part of USC's designathon CreateSC. This case study examines my process, research, and logic in redesigning key features of this application.
BACKGROUND
Back to the Drawing Board
Over this past summer, I competed with a group of 4 of my friends in USC’s second annual CreateSC, held in collaboration with Adobe. We were tasked with creating a mobile app that allows like-minded college students to connect and collaborate on personal projects. Over the course of a weekend, we created JoinIn, which focused on project management, exploration of new projects, and creation of original content.
Although we placed first, I felt that our product could be vastly improved. As we only had a weekend to design the entire app, we researched little and designed whatever idea came to mind.
We lacked focus and instead opted to saturate the product with as much content as possible. Although this strategy covered all bases of the design prompt and yielded a favorable result, I wanted to revisit our concept as it could potentially fill a need for a collaborative platform for proactive, entrepreneurial college students.
How might we provide a platform for users to create, explore, and collaborate projects with ease?
PRODUCT PREVIEW
A Quick Look
Using progressive disclosure in project creation.
With progressive disclosure in mind, I created a flow for creating a project that required only the essential information that would be displayed to users seeking projects.
Defining purpose for project page links and communication.
The interface of the project page was kept simple, with only the three primary functions as tabs within the page. Project links would serve as a centralized hub in which, after a team member is added, can quickly access and be added to team communication/productivity platforms. The project links would not be visible to users visiting the page who are not part of the team.
Establishing hierarchy and search suggestions in Explore.
To encourage users to explore other projects, I placed the search bar and suggested projects at the top of the page to establish a hierarchy of action.
Lastly, to maintain the element of community empowerment from the original app, I decided to feature projects that were created on Launchpad to inspire users to create their own initiatives or projects.
USER RESEARCH
Rethinking Better Design
Re-evaluating the Original Design
After reevaluating the app, I wrote down any improvements to the app user interface, information architecture, and user flow for each screen. Comparing my list to suggestions made by the judges, I distilled my notes to three primary points of action:
01
Choose a focus for the app. Do one thing well instead of a million things poorly.
02
Find out what the user needs. Don't add functions just because you can.
03
Create more accessible interfaces. Design inclusively to address the needs of diverse users.
Discovering the Landscape
To focus my question and solution even more, I conducted 10 user interviews over the course of a week with college students (my intended user base) that focused on their experience with initiating passion projects and any difficulties they might have faced in completing such projects.
People are eager to meet others with similar interests online.
One concern I foresaw was the impressionability of connecting and working with a stranger online, which might act as a deterrent for active collaboration. However, to my surprise, 8 of the 10 interviewees actually felt comfortable with working with someone they just met online (while the remaining 2 noted that they would more likely work with friends or friends of friends). Thus, I concluded that incentivizing connection through app-generated suggestions (either by interest or project) would serve as a primary component of my design.
Time is a limiting factor.
An interesting point that arose during interviews was that time was often a limiting factor for whether or not they started or completed their project. I made sure to include fields where project creators can explicitly state commitment expectations.
With these invaluable insights, I found that the foremost need for users is rapid connection to projects and people interested in collaborating rather than features such as file integration (as apps focused on file sharing effectively fulfilled that need) or workspace communication (a feature of our original app aimed to create Slack-like channels of communication for team members).
KEY FEATURES
01
Putting connection first.
Allow users to quickly find collaborators or projects through a robust suggestion system and easy way to connect with project coordinators through project pages.
02
Making goals and commitments clear.
Allow users seeking collaborators to effectively communicate expectations and time commitments required for projects.
03
Creating a friendly user journey.
Since reaching out online for help might be intimidating, having friendly copy, colors, and elements (such as seeing what friends are up to).
INFO ARCH
Redesigning Logic
After deciding to focus on fleshing out the user journey for project exploration and creation, key features were sorted by topic to structure the app. Other than the “Explore” and new “Create” tabs, the other tabs were kept the same as they do not fall within the scope of this redesign, but would greatly benefit from a reevaluation in the future.
Our original app did not separate project creation as its distinct tab, instead nested within a general "Collaborate" tab as a small, uninformative "+" button. As a key feature of the redesign focuses on creation, I decided to feature "Create" as a separate menu option, thus streamlining project creation for users.
As for the "Explore" tab, I adapted elements from the previous "Search" tab, but included more featured elements and community-type posts as I further break-down of the tab would only distract from the intention of exploring new projects suited to user's expertise.
Initial wireframes and user flows were created on Procreate, with the above research in mind.
BRANDING
A New Name
Though highly customizable and colorful, the text weight and size of the original and first iterations could make reading difficult for vision-deficient users. Furthermore, colors were not highly contrasted and thus might be difficult to distinguish for colorblind users.
Thus, I created a visual identity that stripped down color and allowed for a canvas that users could create themselves, unrestricted and without a primary color palette of primary and secondary colors.
COLORS
Keeping Accessibility in Mind
Though highly customizable and colorful, the text weight and size of the original and first iterations could make reading difficult for vision-deficient users. Furthermore, colors were not highly contrasted and thus might be difficult to distinguish for colorblind users.
Thus, I created a visual identity that stripped down color and allowed for a canvas that users could create themselves, unrestricted and without a primary color palette of primary and secondary colors.
PRODUCT DEMO
The Final Demo
REFLECTIONS
Key Takeaways
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Find what niche the app will cater towards, and try to find the best solution through extensive research, interviews, and iterations.
Don't be married to one idea. Have humility.
Having worked as a team and an individual on this project, I oftentimes found myself drawn to keep elements and concepts, such as "workspaces", because it's easier to design with only my needs in mind.
MOVING FORWARD
In addition to redesigning the other four pages to streamline user flow and better meet the needs of students, I would like to conduct more user interviews, not only to get input on the changes I've made but also to more accurately represent a diverse population of users.
