Building meaningful connections online 💻
Client: University of Toronto Innovation Hub
Platform: iOS
Role: UX Designer, Researcher, Creative Thinker
My Output: User research, Creative Thinking, Visual Design, User flow, Prototyping, Visual Storytelling
Duration: 9 weeks
Team Members: Julia Geisler, Stacey Jiang, Murtaza Kerani, Mujgan Ozceylan, and Ang Xiao
Tools: Figma, Google Docs, Google Slides, Mural
Project Overview
Dwell is an iOS app designed to help students make both personal and professional connections during online learning. 💡
Problem Space
With increased levels of anxiety and alienation and students find it difficult to create meaningful connections 👨🏽💻👩💻
User Research
We conducted secondary and primary research to understand our users better. We surveyed 50 professional Masters students online and had 14 semi-structured virtual interviews at the University of Toronto 📊.
Once our research was collected, we mapped it on an affinity diagram 📝 and found common themes that were important which lead us to creating our persona.
Persona
Linda 👩💻 is a Professional Masters student at the University of Toronto. They're feeling anxious and lonely because they don't know how to create meaningful connections.
After creating our Persona and Empathy Map, we found that Linda's As-Is Scenario consisted of the following steps, pain points and areas of opportunity:
📌Areas of Opportunity & Pain Points ☹️
Approach
Doesn't know how to start a conversation or make connections 👀
Communicate
Feels anxious about sending the first message 💬
Establish
Doesn't know how to form relationships that go beyond academic matters 📚
Ideation
We then established Needs Statements and brainstormed Big Ideas which were subsequently plotted on a Prioritization Grid📈.
Based off our user needs we developed low and mid fidelity prototypes.
Low-Fidelity Prototypes
We created paper prototypes 🔖 based on our user needs. After conducting our usability testing, we moved on to our medium-fidelity prototype.
Medium-Fidelity Prototype
From our insights after usability testing we created our medium-fidelity prototype. We decided to focus on four features: house-style group chats 🏠, individual matching profiles 👥, message prompts 💭, and event ideas 🎬.
House-Style Group Chats 🏠
Our solution sorts Linda into a specific house where they can meet with a group of people with similar hobbies, interests and skills that complement each other. A fun and exciting way to connect with some one new. ✨
Matching Profiles 👥
Our solution will allow Linda to find other individuals on the app with shared interests so they can potentially match with them and form connections outside of their faculty.🏀🖌
Messaging Prompt 💬
Our solution provides Linda with suggested prompts that they can send directly or customize to their liking. ✅
Event Ideas 🎬
Our solution provides Linda with a list of curated events and allows them to share these events with their connections. This helps Linda to take their relationships to the next level while helping them to advance professional development. 🤝
Next Steps 🚨
• Improve the onboarding experience to show the intention behind each feature and introduce tools available in the app
• Simplify how users add interests and skills, also allow users to fill it out right after they create their profile
• Improve the User Interface to make the experience more intuitive and in line with mental models
• Keep updating, refining and polishing the user flows and user interface.
Key Takeaways 🔑
• Working on creating key features to address pain points effectively. Keeping focus and narrowing down on direction helps to design an optimal user experience
• Iterate, iterate and iterate. Always placing the user back in to the design thinking process.
Check out the high-fidelity version of this design, called Circle, by clicking here.
More Works
