Student Engagement App Redesign

Output

STUDENT PROJECT FOR CLIENT

Role

INTERACTION & UI DESIGNER, STRATEGIST, CO-RESEARCHER (GROUP OF 3)

Background

URSLC was a mobile app created by St. Lawrence College in Kingston, ON to connect SLC students to their school through in-app chatrooms, resources, and events.

Objective

The app’s content manager came to my class expressing low SLC event turnout stats. To address this, we developed a fictional app redesign with the goal to increase engagement for school events.

Strategy

I worked with a team of researchers to interview SLC students about their experience with the URSLC app. We found that users were getting overwhelmed due to the app’s wide scope of resources and lack of organized content.

We each developed our own design solution. I determined mandates of rewording the navigation, emphasizing imagery, and improving type hierarchy.

Design

The redesigned app allows users to find and manage events easier. The previous ‘Search’ page with event listings was renamed ‘Events’ to prevent confusion. Social events were favoured by users, so categories were added including ‘Social’. Larger thumbnails draw the user in, supplementing the amount of text. Event listings have a wider type hierarchy with details categorized by ‘When’, ‘Where’, and ‘About’.

The URSLC app redesign can be found here.

Challenges

Being my first design research project, our team initially struggled coming up with strong research questions to address user and client needs. We overcame this by looking into this topic and running brainstorm sessions. We learned that research questions should incorporate a variety of research methods, answer the Five Ws, and balance user and client needs.

Licensing

Icons in this project were provided by FontAwesome (modified): https://fontawesome.com/license/free