The Plan

Problem Statement

It can get extremely difficult for a student to keep track of the various events and happenings on and around the campus, both academic and non-academic. Tuning into local happenings and becoming a part of the student community can require a significant amount of time and effort. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that there are so many different sources of events like email, websites (like events.umich.edu), Facebook, and calendar systems like Google Calendar. Being new to the University and its surrounding areas makes it even tougher, especially if you’re an international student. Solving this problem would entail making it easier for students to stay informed about events occurring around their campus, but in a way that keeps them from being overwhelmed by an overload of information.

Solution Overview

My solution addresses this problem by:

• Importing events from various sources
• Aggregating and keeping track of events (calendar functionality)
• Automatically sorting events into customisable categories, allowing users to filter their view of events
• Displaying daily schedules in an easy-to-understand format

The functionality is provided to the user in the form of an Android application.

Methods and Tools

Interviews, Comparative Analysis, Sketches, Paper Prototyping, Wireframing in Sketch, Digital Prototyping using Marvel, Design Space Analysis (QOC Diagrams)

Comparative Analysis

I conducted a Comparative Analysis to familiarise myself with products that fulfill similar needs for people. Through this analysis, I hoped to identify:

• What these products get right
• Where these products fail

Each of these products fulfills some part of a person's needs, but not all of them. I decided to go ahead and incorporate the best parts (easy aggregation of events from various sources, discovering new events etc.) of all these products in my own application, along with features that would support hyper-local, real-time event broadcasting.

Sketches

The objective here was to quickly sketch out rough workflows for each task, without worrying too much about the interface details. Apart from thinking through design solutions, this task was also intended to improve my ability to quickly communicate my ideas to others using a low-fidelity and low-cost method.

Personas

I created three user personas to record and refine my understanding of the behaviour and needs of the people I was designing this application for, and to determine the functionality that it would need to provide to fulfill their needs. 

I also created one anti-persona, a representation of the kind of user that my application was not targeted at.

Group Brainstorming

During a group brainstorming session, each participant first presented their respective problems and solutions. After the brief presentation, the rest of the group would discuss that project and offer their suggestions and concerns.

The exercise provided me with design considerations, ideas for refinement and more features, and crucially, limitations.

Interviews

I interviewed 6 students from the University of Michigan:

• 1 junior (Michigan)
• 2 freshmen (Mexico and Michigan)
• 3 first-year graduate students (India)

I asked them various questions with the goal of determining:

A] How relevant the problem was to their lives

B] Their views on possible solutions

The main takeaways from the interviews were:

1) Most students were only interested in receiving real-time event broadcasts if it involved a way for them to get free food.

2) Most students agreed that event aggregation from multiple sources would be very useful, but had concerns about filtering these events to avoid information overload.

3) As expected, newer students (first-year undergraduate/graduate students),  especially international students, identified with the problem the most.

The insights gained from these interviews helped immensely with narrowing the scope of my solution, and focusing on the most important functionality.

Design Space Analysis

Prototyping on Paper

After _____, it was time for my first prototype. I used paper, sharpies, scissors, tape and a little bit of imagination to quickly create a paper prototype of my project. This being a low-fidelity prototyping exercise, it was focused on representing tasks and interactions, rather than elaborate interface details.

I started out with traditional paper prototyping, with many small and large pieces of different kinds of paper, some of which are shown below.

While I enjoyed being the facilitator and switching screens and interface elements around as test participants interacted with them, I began to feel like it was getting slightly inconvenient to keep track of all the little pieces of paper while simultaneously observing user behaviour and recording issues.

I decided to use the Marvel App to create a slightly higher-fidelity prototype using my pieces of paper. I knew that this demanded the investment of some time to take the photographs and select hotspots, etc. but I decided to try it and see whether the benefits justified the effort at this early stage of prototyping. This is the prototype.

There were a number of pros and cons to creating a digital prototype from paper artifacts at an early stage. 

The advantages were:
- People interact with the prototype in a more natural manner when compared with physical pieces of paper.

- I could concentrate on observation and recording issues since I didn't have to physically replicate interface behaviour.

- The minimal setup time when compared with traditional paper prototyping, meant I could perform more tests.

The disadvantages were:
- Initial investment of time required to take photographs of the paper, create hotspots and links screens.

- It obviously took much longer to make modifications to this prototype based on feedback, than it takes with traditional paper prototyping.

One of the more important insights I gained through paper prototyping was the importance of using clear copy for buttons. 

Digital Prototyping

The final stage of my project was the completion of my digital prototype. I created the screens in using Sketch, and built the prototype using Marvel. Go on, give it a whirl!

Lessons Learned

The most important lessons I learned over the course of this project are:

- Defining the scope is hard, and needs to be done as early as possible to minimise wasted time and effort.

- Time should not be spent on visual design at the cost of more design iterations.

- While all feedback is important, not all suggestions need to be incorporated.