Redesign concept for a UC Davis website to help students find community
October 2021 – December 2021
Figma, FigJam
Laura Yien, Anna Marrero, Charles Meng, Urvi Garnorkar, and Jamie Chou (Project Mentor)
01. INTRO
As a designer in Design Interactive’s Fall 2021 Cohort, I worked with a team to redesign AggieLife, a UC Davis website that allows students to find clubs and activities on campus, during a 6-week sprint. Our final product was a proof of concept high-fidelity prototype that we presented on Final Presentation Day to a panel of UX professionals. There, we won “Best Prototype” for our work on this project.
As one of four designs on the team, I conducted user interviews, sketched wireframes, and synthesized findings with my team. I was primarily responsible for designing AggieLife’s personalized home page, onboarding user flow, and finding events user flow.
02. RESEARCH
To learn more about current issues with AggieLife, we surveyed 29 UC Davis students and conducted 5 student interviews.
From our survey, we found that 51% of students have a hard time getting involved on campus and 69% have never used AggieLife before. Most students use Facebook and Instagram to find clubs on campus.
From our interviews, we found that students don’t consider AggieLife a viable option for finding and interacting with clubs. The search filters were too broad and difficult to use–no “design” filter, only “Arts”. Additionally, students were overwhelmed by the amount of information shown about all 800+ clubs at UC Davis, including clubs that were not interesting to them.
After conducting user research, we synthesized our findings through affinity mapping where we identified pain points with the existing AggieLife design. We formulated research questions to guide our designs moving forward.
After conducting user research, we synthesized our findings through affinity mapping where we identified pain points with the existing AggieLife design. We formulated research questions to guide our designs moving forward.
Our overarching research question was:
How might we foster a sense of connection, community, engagement, and excitement within AggieLife?
Since this was a 6-week sprint, we also narrowed down our scope to focus on redesigning the home page and ways for students to find organizations and events on campus. AggieLife also had other features like an extensive profile page and news section that we found were not core features for students.
We created two more research questions to guide our design for these two major features:
We also created two personas to help us empathize with our target users, students who are looking to get involved and find community on campus.
03. DESIGN PROCESS
Using our research questions, we began sketching wireframe solutions. A common theme among our ideas was to create a personalized experience which would help find clubs that were relevant to students’ interests.
We used current UC Davis branding colors to tie AggieLife to the university and used Lato, a sans serif typeface, rounded corners, and drop shadows to make it feel modern and appealing to college students.
We also designed a card component system to easily scan information about clubs and events. In comparison to the existing listview, a card format could display more information in less space. We implemented a color-coded tagging system to make it easier to filter clubs and easily identify the purpose of the club.
We conducted usability testing with 5 UC Davis students. They were given 2 tasks to complete: log in to AggieLife and complete the onboarding process and find the club ‘#Include’ and save it to your favorites.
Positive Feedback: Tagging system was easy to read and understand. Liked the clean interface, especially the design of the cards.
Areas to Improve: Elements were too big which caused confusion about the ability to scroll for more information. There were missed opportunities for personalization such as favoriting a club in the onboarding process and RSVPing to an event. There were missing links between pages and a need for better microinteractions.
04. FINAL DESIGNS
Add interests and favorite clubs to help AggieLife recommend clubs and events that are catered to you.
Use specific filters to find clubs that are relevant to you, view details about the club including meeting times and events, and apply and be approved to join a club if interested (most clubs at UC Davis involve an application or membership process).
RSVP to confirm attendance and add the event to your calendar.
05. REFLECTIONS AND NEXT STEPS
The AggieLife Redesign Project was one of five teams participating in Design Interactive’s Fall 2021 Cohort. On Final Presentation Day, where all teams presented their work to a judging panel of UX Designers in industry, our team won “Best Prototype”.
Next steps for this project would be to explore a mobile version of AggieLife, which would suit the busy, on-the-go lifestyle of a college student.
This project was the first time that I’ve worked on a team with other designers– previously I worked independently and with one partner. I learned how to collaborate and communicate my rationale behind design decisions with my team. Additionally, I learned of the importance of using user research and usability testing findings to help determine how to narrow down scope and to identify which features are the most important. Overall, this was a valuable learning experience and I will use the lessons I’ve learned for future projects!