Overview
I did this project in Fall 2020 in this group:
Brandon Kim, Ines Acosta, Sean Perryman, and Ting Yu.
Problem
With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, college life has become all virtual. Students are not able to go to classes or clubs in-person like they used to. As such, this creates a problem of students not being able to form a truly close-knit community with their peers, particularly in clubs outside of their studies. We wanted to make an app or website that allowed students to participate in clubs remotely so they could still remain safe while the pandemic is still ravaging the world.
Solution (our app)
Club Collective is an app designed to assist freshman college students with their searches for clubs to join in a remote-only setting, especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic. It is a site that stores data on all the different clubs at a student's specific university and then lets them search for and enroll in the clubs they want with different levels of roles (non-member, member, or administrator).
Features
Club Collective has 5 major components to its functionality that help its users maintain a strict diet (see images below):
1) A dashboard where the user can see all the clubs they are enrolled in and a list of upcoming events.
2) Pages for individual clubs that lets users see important notifications and upcoming events.
3) A keyword search page that lets users search for and register for specific clubs in their university's online database.
4) A search function for finding specific members of different clubs and connecting with them.
5) A calendar page that lists upcoming events, deadlines, and hyperlinks for all clubs.
1) The Dashboard page
2) Pages for individual clubs
3) Club Search page
4) Club Member Search page
5) Calendar page
Phases of project:
1) Research [August-September 2020]
We started our project by talking to people in our target demographic and gathering information on how their daily lives were affected by the pandemic, as well as what college clubs they wanted to join and had already joined.
Methods used: Semi-structured interviews + Data analysis, Observations, Hierarchal Task Analysis
2) Design [September-October 2020]
This phase consisted of designing our app through making wireframes and then making a usable prototype on Figma. During this phase, we talked to other people in our target demographic to get their input on how well our designs seemed to meet their needs for registering in clubs.
Methods used: Idea generation, Sketches & Storyboards, Wireframes & Prototypes
3) User Testing [November-December 2020]
We finalized and tested our app prototype with several potential end users and got their feedback on what features were good and what features needed improvements.
Methods used: User interviews, Likert Scale questions, User Feedback
My Contributions
Research
Semi-structured interviews (remote)
These interviews were used to ask other college freshman students (several of whom are enrolled in Georgia Tech) what their lives were like in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design
Wireframes
Using the Balsamiq program, I created several wireframes for multiple ideas my group came up with for the site. Ideas we had included:
-a gamified club system where students earn rewards for participating in club activities
-a buddy system that lets you search for other students in specific clubs, and
-a VR site where students can attend virtual club meetings while still feeling somewhat like an in-person meeting by using 3D computer avatars instead.
Storyboards
I drew up some storyboard panels for the features of our app in action on ProCreate for the iPad, which is pictured to the right. These storyboards cover the VR club website for virtual meetings.
User Testing
User interviews + quantitative feedback
I conducted a few user testing interviews by having a user test our group prototype, and I asked them Likert Scale questions for feedback. One such interview is pictured right.
VR Club site for virtual meetings
VR Club site for virtual meetings
Buddy system for talking to other club members
Gamified Club system
Storyboards: VR Club site
User feedback session with Jason Dong
My team and I
This is a group picture of me (top right) and my teammates Ting, Sean, and Ines (counter-clockwise from top left). We worked together on this project and the SafeEats prototype throughout the Fall 2020 semester.
