Our group set out with the objective to bridge the gap between UofT students and finding social events to help create opportunities for making social connections. Eventhub, our final product, is a solution that enhance the sense of connectedness amongst UofT graduate students by providing a way for graduate students to easily find the types of social events they are genuinely interested in attending.
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Current State of Domain: Students are finding social events through numerous emails, word of mouth, student-run events, and social media platforms.
Existing Mechanism Fails to Address: Students are overwhelmed with how the information about social events are scattered across platforms
Event Hub - an application that provides UofT students with all UofT affiliated social events within one platform, suggests events tailored to the user’s interest and keeps you updated on popular events.
Data was gathered from 10 semi-structured interviews and 35 surveys, all of which were completed by graduate students from the University of Toronto. The interviews were conducted face-to-face, while the surveys were distributed electronically.
Based on the insights obtained from both the interviews and surveys, an affinity diagram was created to identify the primary themes and challenges associated with establishing social connections at UofT.
Developing a sense of belonging and nurturing lasting relationships are essential elements for a rewarding and prosperous university experience. Nevertheless, the endeavor of establishing these social connections can pose challenges due to the following factors:
“... It’s just a bombardment of information from different platforms...”
We analyzed the data to build Newton, a student persona that would lead the team through a user-centered design process.
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We voted on a prioritisation grid to assess the impact and feasibility of our ideas:
How impactful it would be for our target users
Is it technically feasible to implement this as a group.
Based on our voting, we plotted our ideas on the prioritization grid, We decided to explore and work on the following ideas for now: "Events for U", " Event Directory" and "Event Manager“.
We would leave the idea of "Interactive Map" and “Social Network for Events” for the future as they both have reasonable feasibility and impact.
With the need statements in mind, we individually generated ideas and then gathered as a group to discuss and assess our big ideas!
A calendar-based platform that syncs with personal agendas, allowing students to explore and keep track of upcoming events.
A personalized event matching solution that recommends relevant events based on Newton's interests and personality, including popular social events in his vicinity.
An inclusive platform with sortable and filterable event listings for user convenience.
We individually brainstormed and sketched low-fi prototypes. We shared our prototypes with each other and during this iteration, we converged on all the shared design ideas. Additionally, we picked out the different features we liked from each others’ sketches and discussed to include them in the final lo-fi prototype. Our design focused on three main flows:
1. Onboarding
2. Browsing and filtering through all the social events3. Registering for a popular event
I conducted lean evaluation tests with 3 University of Toronto students, who served as representative users. During a Zoom call, I encouraged them to utilize a "think-aloud" approach to provide feedback on the features, layouts, and areas for improvement of our app's designs.
Understanding the importance of giving the users freedom of choice we incorporated this feedback in our medium fidelity prototype by adding a “Skip and Do Later” button and “Filter” menu. We also updated page layout, to organize popular events by categories, instead of using a filter by category option.
We conducted virtual usability tests to collect feedback on the design and workflow of our clickable medium-fidelity prototype. Through observation, we gathered attitudinal and behavioral data, and post-task and post-test interviews were conducted to gather feedback on the overall experience.
The feedback was then compiled into an affinity diagram to analyze the data for our next steps.
Now, let's take a brief look at our app,
Event Hub. It is a social event finding application designed specifically for UofT students, allowing you to explore a wide range of events that are customized to your preferences.
During the onboarding process, users are provided with a quick overview of the app's features and are able to sign in easily using their UtorID (University ID) and set their interests. Once completed, users are greeted with a curated collection of events tailored to their preferences.
Students have the option to explore the suggested events or utilize the search and filtering functionalities to find specific events that match their needs.
Event Hub provides users with a glimpse of the most popular events in each category, aiding them in selecting the event they wish to attend.
Reflecting the project goals and scope, the proposed design delivers a user-friendly, intuitive experience that helps students easily discover social events aligned with their interests, fostering meaningful connections. The streamlined search process directly addresses key pain points identified through primary research.Moving forward, steps beyond the current project scope include:
To explore how Event Hub could further enhance the sense of community amongst UofT students and make it easier to find and be apart of certain student communities within UofT through social events.
Further iterate on the medium fidelity prototype to address usability pain points.
Focus on another key persona, the event organizer
As a UX designer, I learnt it's important to set aside preconceived ideas and listen to what your users have to say. We realized during our first research phase that if we approached our users with preconceived design ideas, we would be prejudiced since we can only accept input that aligns with our pre-set beliefs.
Our design "seems too functional rather than emotional," according to one insightful comment. This drew my attention since we had set out to create a digital service that would give students a sense of connection. How can we create designs that appeal to people's emotions? We came up with one answer for this project: incorporate more visual components in a storytelling approach in our design to engage users, which we want to test in future iterations.
User interviews, affinity diagramming, usability testing, and heuristic evaluation are all now staples in my toolkit, but one crucial lesson I learnt was when to use which tool. More significantly, I learnt to improve my empathy and storytelling skills through frequent, iterative feedback, which will help me as I progress in the UX industry.
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