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College-centric event management app that allows students to browse, share, and RSVP to events going on or around their campuses.

My Role:

As the team's UI/UX designer, I conceptualized feautures to build by conducting user research and making sketches to help facilitate development.

Tools:

InVision, Photoshop, Illustrator

Year:

2019

The Challenge

Currently, there is no single platform for students to view events happening on or around their campus. They have to rely on flyers, word-of-mouth, or Facebook posts to stay in the loop, which can be inefficient. This generates many missed opportunities for students to partake in activities that they would have enjoyed. Event organizers also suffer from the lack of event attendance due to low awareness.

The Solution

CampusEvents is a native mobile application that allows students to browse through a catalogs of university-centric events happening on or around campus. The application also encourages students to attend events by providing personalized recommendations, sending reminder notifications, and allowing users to follow their favorite organizations.

Design Process

USER RESEARCH
Creating an Assumptions Map

To get a better understanding of the application's scope and assess potential risks, we created an assumptions map. We determined user assumptions, related validation tests, and risk levels. This assumptions map later helped us format our interview questions and provided a foundation for our prototype evaluation period.

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Interviewing college students and event organizers

We interviewed nine people, four of which were evaluated as event organizers and the other five evaluated as event goers. Two of the event organizers are fulltime employees at the Boston University Arts Initiative, while the rest of the interviewees are undergraduate students.

Key Takeaways
Event Organizers
  1. The current channels of advertising reach a very small percentage of the school
  2. It is exhausting to have to make flyers, Facebook event pages, email newsletters, etc. for each event
Event Goers
  1. Many people miss out on events that they would have attended but heard about too late
  2. Underclassmen especially want to go to more events that align with their interests
  3. People usually come across events by coincidence or through word-of-mouth
Meet our user personas

After synthesizing our initial research, we created two user persona maps to help us empathize with our target users during the ideation phase. Freshman Fred represents the event goer audience, while Club President Patricia represents the event organizer audience.

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IDEATION
Design Sprint

As a team, we held a two-day long design sprint to think of functionalities and features to include in our application. We did several brainstorming exercises including Crazy Eights, creating "How might we" questions, and affinity mapping. We concluded our design sprint by sketching wireframes based off our favorite ideas.

Some of the questions we considered:

  1. How is Campus Events unique in helping students find events compared to Eventbrite and Facebook?
  2. What incentive do students and event organizers have to use the Campus Events platform?
  3. If our goal is to increase event awareness, how can we bring the right content to the right audience?

Our solutions:

  1. Provide users with a catalog of events being hosted at their schools, including events hosted by student clubs.
  2. Show popular trending events so that users stay in the loop and provide users with customized event recommendations based off of their preferences and past attended events.
  3. Have users fill out a quick questionnaire on their demographics and event interests. Event organizers can categorize their events with tags and target audience preferences so that events that match with user preferences will appear in the user's recommended events.
DESIGN & PROTOTYPE
Wireframe sketches

After our design sprint, we decided to prioritize on designing the app for the event-goer instead of both the event-goer and the event organizer. We chose to focus on three major aspects, which are identity validation, user onboarding, and the event searching process.