Awaiting

An app for new students

Project time

6 days (2021/02)

BACKGROUND

Academy of art university(AAU) is an art school in San Francisco, It owns 40 school buildings located in different places in San Francisco. It has always been a problem to look for the right building, especially for new students. Many students from outside of the Bay area or the US are coming to AAU, and because most of them have not been to the bay, they always have lots of questions or concerns about the campus, the city, and the life at AAU 

Therefore, Awaiting will be providing a thoughtful and helpful assistant to help new students prepare and adjust to school life quickly and early

RESEARCH PLAN

Methodology

Customer Interviews: I will be interviewing people with questions about what kind of information they wanted to know and what kind of problems they were facing when they entered a new school and when they became experienced students. And I asked them about their preference for answering new students' questions.

Goals

1. Find out new students’ needs and problems

2. Find out how to get more experienced students use the app.

INTERVIEWS

Insights / Summary Map

PERSONA

BRAINSTORMING

Takeaways:

1, Using a less rigid design might provide a friendly first impression.

2, Using a pop-up bottom menu can save more space, as the app will provide lots of information.

TASKS FLOW

WIREFRAME SKETCHES

LOW-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

PROTOTYPE TESTING

MEDIUM-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

UI STYLE GUIDE

HIGH-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

Scenario 1:

A new student wants to look for information some of the campus' buildings their locations. Then he needs to send a private invitation to an experienced student for an academic question.

Scenario 2:

A new student wants to ask which class is better for him as he is interested in motion graphics. And he wants to check if there is any school activity he might be interested.

Scenario 3:

A new student wants to join some group chats to meet new friends. Then he searched for topics of dorm information.

Scenario 4:

 An experienced student sets up her preferences of answering, and replies to a private invitation.

FINAL TAKEAWAYS

1: 

There are many valuable insights and opportunities came from the users' interview and research. In this project, I spent more time analyzing and summarizing the user interview results than the user interview itself. Although the interviewees had been through the process of being a new student to a new campus, they provided different points of view of the same problems. And these are finally being valuable to the project.

2: 

From this project, I realized that there may be more problems behind a simple requirement or challenge. Sometimes, we can't just focus on one issue. We need to focus on what's behind the problem, for example, its real cause, the factors related to it, and the relationship between it and users. Sometimes, there may be too many related problems. Therefore, we can not only care about quantity and ignore the quality and fundamentals. We need to grasp the critical part, find out the focus, and plan the design process well.