Ami
Fostering college freshmen friendships in a virtual environment
UX Design
Mobile
My Role
UX Designer/Researcher
Brand Designer
Team
Kenji Fujinaka
UX Designer/Researcher
Timeline
Jan 2021 - Mar 2021
(10 weeks)
Tools
Figma
Miro
PowerPoint
Han Feng
UX Designer/Researcher
Overview
This project occurred during an HCDE User Centered Design course with the defined problem space of "Health and Wellness in 2021." Expecting that the pandemic greatly impacted college freshmen's transition into a new environment, we decided to focus on college freshmen entering universities during the COVID-19 pandemic as target users.
Our project was aimed at exploring how the pandemic has affected freshmen’s ability to cultivate strong friendships and relationships in a virtual environment, and take care of their mental health.
Design Question
How might we help college freshmen foster a sense of community and belonging, form friendships, and improve their mental health and social wellness during the pandemic?
Competitive Analysis
Concurrently with our user research, we each conducted a competitive analysis on a product related to our problem space. I analyzed Schools App, and my other team members explored icebreaker.video, and Flipgrid.
Beyond evaluating the app's capabilities, the goal of my competitive analysis was to find common themes of users’ experiences and learn how the product meets and fails to meet users’ goals and needs.
Method
Because there were a lack of formal studies surveying users' perceptions on this product, I created an affinity diagram of the app's Apple App Store reviews (n = 64 out of 186 reviews), excluding those focused on bugs, crashing, and additional software development feedback.
User Research
As a team, we conducted a total of five user interviews with college freshmen attending schools all over the US. The cards below display the main four axes of the differing circumstances our participants were experiencing.
Time Zone
Same or different from school
Local, out of state, and international students.
Living Situation
At home, in the dorms, off-campus housing
With family or roommates
In Class or Not
Deferred, taken classes since start of school year, or stopped partway through semester/quarter
Academic & Social
Amount of importance placed on academics and socializing
Varied drastically across participants
The two participants I interviewed attended different universities, including one in Seattle and another in New York City. Below are a few key quotes that surfaced.
Affinity Mapping
As shown below, we then affinity mapped to identify common themes across all our user interviews.
User Research Insights
Six main research insights surfaced through affinity mapping related to users' pain points, motivations, and goals, including:
1
Post-Pandemic worries of not having a community
Not having a community of friends once everything's in-person again is a great post-pandemic worry. It's hard to create a connection virtually when meeting people online feels impersonal.
2
Freshmen generally aren't attending online school events
While community events are held online, students are usually deterred from not knowing how many people will attend. People have either gone to events and found that very few people attended, or haven't gone because they don't think others will attend, or don't go because they don't have the time to spare.
3
Impact of deferring
For some, deferring creates an additional sense of isolation that takes a toll because school and student activities can be restrictive for students who technically aren’t students yet, and socializing with friends in school is harder due to operating on different schedules. For others, the transition after deferring was easier because they already had a support system of friends at their school.
4
Transition without a support system
The transition feels especially hard for freshmen moving away from home, going to college in a new city during the pandemic without the same support group of friends. Freshmen living at home also lacked a support system they felt college roommates could provide. As such, many participants talked about relying on their friends from high school, as well as family, and taking on a manageable workload to improve mental health.
5
Connections limited to Social Media
It is challenging to constantly be the first one to reach out through social media (e.g., Instagram DM) to form friendships, which can be a hit or miss. It's also hard because sometimes it ends in a passive connection only maintained by viewing each other’s social media feeds.
6
Types of desired connections
Students prefer to connect to each other not only for academic purposes on course discussion platforms; they are also seeking connections on personal interests. Finding commonalities and shared interests to get to know each other better helps to connect and make friends with others.
Personas
To distill our user research and anchor our understanding of our user group, we developed two personas, Leah and Jayden. The two personas demonstrate the range of freshmen to whom we talked, including along the spectrums of the four axes of participant characteristics mentioned earlier (see User Research section).
We documented and mapped out the sources of each detail within our personas to ensure they are (anonymously) representative of our user interviews. We noted and justified any assumptions we made, to remain grounded in our research.
User Journey Map
We also created an in-depth user journey map of a typical day of online classes and socializing for one of our personas, Jayden. Mapping out Jayden's emotions helped to identify and illustrate the biggest pain points of our users to address when as we moved into creating our design requirements.
Design Goals and Requirements
After completing our user research and distillations such as the user journey map, we created 4 overarching design goals and 11 design requirements. Below are our design goals.
Design Goals
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Facilitate new interpersonal connections between college freshmen catered to their specific needs and interests.
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Increase feelings of connection, belonging, and community between first-year college students, especially those without an existing network at their university.
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Aid freshmen in developing friendships that lead to a stronger support network.
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Improve students' mental health by creating a virtual community for freshmen that grows into a stronger support system.
Storyboarding
We then created two storyboards each, to illustrate the range of different possible use cases our potential solution could have to alleviate users' pain points and satisfy user needs. Below are the two I made.
After establishing our design goals, requirements and use cases, we individually ideated solutions that followed those frameworks. Below are five of the sketches I created.
Ideation
As a team, we critiqued the sketches we ideated individually, categorizing different parts of the designs as aspects to integrate, combine, replace, or modify to then consolidate the solution into a single design.
Information Architecture
As we started developing a low-fi prototype, we also solidified our information architecture to encompass four main task flows: setting preferences, connect with other freshmen, chatting, and browsing bookmarked profiles.
Lo-Fi Prototype
Below is the lo-fi prototype we created after our IA was established.
User Testing
We then conducted one user test each (n=3) with our user group using the lo-fi prototype. Below is one notable quote from the test session I facilitated, which emphasizes how other users shape the experience.
Creating a Visual Language
To ensure that a consistent design system was used throughout the application, I created the following visual language guide.
Final Product
Our final hi-fi prototype incorporated both the user testing results and our visual language.
Branded as Ami, a play on words that imply friend or friendship (amity, ami(e) in French, etc.), our platform is designed for first-year college students to make connections both socially and academically by finding friends and forming study groups online based on their preferences and classes. Most importantly, Ami enables users can make connections with other students on their own terms and in ways that can grow into long-lasting support systems.
Design Decisions
Here is a short demo that highlights key product features and related design decisions.
Onboarding
Preferences
Allows users to express their preferences for forming friendships and to provide information about themselves for other users to get to know them better.
Includes questions of:
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Connects seeking
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Major
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Size of groups for socializing or studying
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Classes
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Interests
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Best times for socializing
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Profile picture
Reflection
From talking to just five first-year college students, we learned a lot about the challenges freshmen have been facing when transitioning to college virtually. I also learned a lot about how to keep a team moving forward in the moments where we weren't sure how to proceed.
If we had more time, I would propose:
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Conducting more user interviews with a wider range of users, both geographically and by type of university (e.g., 2-year universities, community colleges)
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Spending more time ideating and critiquing our designs
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Further developing the pathways of our prototypes (e.g., for deeper consideration of how to safeguard freshmen from other people who might infringe on their privacy, safety, emotional state, comfort, and more)
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Additional usability testing of our prototypes, to learn more about which aspects work well or need to be changed
Other Work
© 2020 by Emma Sadjo.