NearU is a group chat app that assembles people into virtual chat lounges based on building location. The pinboard associated with every building allows students to quickly scan for the up-to-date information.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
👨🏻💻 TEAM
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3 Students
🛠 TOOLS
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Figma
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Google Form
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Zoom
⏱ Duration
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8 Weeks
📁 ROLE
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UX Designer
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UX Reseacher
🔑 MY KEY CONTRIBUTIONS
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Designed and distributed surveys
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Designed and conducted structured interviews and contextual interviews
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Conducted usability tests
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Collaborated in paper prototype design & designed prototype
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Generated the report
🎯 Goal
To create a prototype demonstrating a chat app that allows users to connect with nearby people
Design Process
Exploring the problem
The problem space of NearU is mainly about two major problems of university students:
1. The lack of a flexible and pressure-free environment for students to socialize on campus.
2. The inability to get quick responses to urgent requests.
After brainstorming, my group developed a solution to address these problems. This led to a rough idea for NearU, a group chat app that is based on the building users are in and contains a pinboard function for students to view important information in nearby buildings quickly. To help increase app usability, we also ran an existing product comparison and wrote 2 Scenarios and corresponding use cases.
Defining user needs
Product proposal interview
With the product idea, we wrote our product proposals. The first stage of our data-gathering plan was to make sure that our plan was good enough to commit to. We each brought our proposal to 3-5 interviewees and asked for opinions on design ideas. Most respondents reported(bullet the finds) that they thought the location-based chat rooms were quite interesting as they had never heard of such settings before and thought it could be a helpful function.
Structural interview
After analyzing the first initial proposal interview result, we designed a structured interview. This interview served to get a better understanding of what features in the design were most appealing to our users so that we could start developing a low-fidelity prototype.
Our interview included an introduction, five warm-up questions, 13 main questions, a cool-off question and a closing statement.
We talked to 10 people about their initial feelings about our application. The results of this section interview helped us to understand the usability of our app and to determine some detailed product features.
Key findings from interview results:
1. Most of the participants were excited about the function of our app
2. They raised the question of the position of the pinboard.
3. They raised the question of the expiration time of the pinned message.
4. They wanted preset sub-chat rooms.
In short, their responses reflected that users would like to have the freedom to customize the application. This interview feedback was integral during our initial design phase.
Low-fidelity prototype design
We designed our paper prototype and marked the interaction in the design(Figure 1).
Figure 1: Initial paper prototype
Usability tests
We asked 6 participants to do 12 tasks on the app and give us feedback.
They gave some valuable suggestions about the interface. We discussed regularly and reiterated the paper prototype design after each usability test to achieve the goal of usability, enjoyment, ease to learn, as well as the effectiveness of the product. Then we came up with our more complete paper prototype design (Figure 2).
Main Improvement:
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Changed the main menu from the Lounge Chat Room page to the Chanel menu.
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Added limited direct message function for strangers to chat.
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Detailed the search function to search in Pinboard and chat room.
Figure 2: Revised Paper Prototype
Contextual Interview
We conducted contextual Interviews at two frequently visited places:
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Dining hall (Figure 4)
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Library (Figure 5)
The contextual interviews helped us identify unforeseen circumstances that could affect the way users interact with our app. The contextual interviews also revealed inconsistencies and bugs in our paper prototype.
Figure 4: Dinning hall task list
Figure 5: Library task list
We received much precious feedback during the contextual interviews. These contextual interviews highlighted the following user challenges:
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They wanted the pinboard to disappear after popped up for a period of time.
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How will we display the pinboard message in each room (lounge/sub chat room/ private room)?
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They wanted to seek help from friends before seeking help from strangers.
In a post-interview team meeting, we decided to make the following changes to address users' concerns:
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Added a Setting that the pinboard will be popped out for a while and then disappear when users entered a room.
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Changed the display way of the pinboard in each kind of chat room.
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Allowed users to check if friends are in the same building.
Survey & Final prototype design
Using the feedback from the contextual interviews, we created a high-fidelity prototype of our app. We created and sent out a survey questionnaire(people, numbers of people) that covered minor details regarding the interface design and utility of our app to polish up our high-fidelity prototype.
Our high-fidelity prototype was created by Figma. Figure 6 shows the design flow of NearU, which makes it incredibly easy to swipe between all the main important pages.
Figure 6: Design Flow of the NearU
Below is a video mockup of high-fidelity NearU.
Video: NearU MockUp
Project impact
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I gained extensive experience in product design, guiding projects from ideation to the creation of high-fidelity prototypes
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Throughout this journey, I have honed my expertise in a wide array of UX research methods and have developed a strong aptitude for UX design.
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The ultimate outcome has been the creation of a product designed to enhance students' interactions with those around them, providing tangible benefits to both the students and their communities.
My learning
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Given the limited resources and time, designing a product can't address all the user's suggestions. It's crucial to focus on the most important things.
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What I Would Do Differently: I would make sure that at every research stage, we have enough participants to gain a well-rounded understanding of the insights.
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If I had more time: I would include competitive analysis in our research process. This would help us better understand what similar apps do well and where we can stand out.
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If I had more time: I would spend it on improving the user interface. Currently, our product only includes the essential elements, and we haven't made it look beautiful yet.