Organization Helper App – Konstantin Kirovski

Overview

Contributors: Ein Chang, Konstantin Kirovski, Oscar Hamilton, Fatima Mahmoud

When joining different Universities, many students find it difficult to adapt to the new communities. Many students even struggle until their junior years. Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic made this transition to college even worse for many new students. I, alongside three other students at Cornell, worked as a UX Designer and UX Researcher in order to find an adequate solution to this issue. After conducting multiple thorough interviews with the users, the Organization Helper app was designed.

Research

In our discovery phase, we conducted interviews with three college students, either freshmen or transfer, in order to better understand their feelings regarding their experience at Cornell. We wanted to learn whether the pandemic changed the process of joining the clubs, which organizations are they looking for, and whether there are any issues that they experience when trying to join different clubs.

After running the interviews, we have identified key insights related to this issue:

- - - - Interviewees preferred in-person interaction to meet people
        
        Interviewees learned about clubs through three main ways: social media, friends,
        and Cornell resources like CampusGroup
        
        Interviewees were surprised by competitive clubs and the selection process
        
        Interviewees join clubs mainly because of the interest, their careers or because they
        want to belong to a social club
        
        Interviewees wanted more information before joining clubs

After successfully identifying the key insights, I proceeded to persona creation.

Persona

Our persona is a freshman, aged 18 and currently planning on majoring in Engineering but still undecided whether she will opt for Biological or Chemical Engineering. For the purposes of this assignment, we will call our persona Julia. She is coming from New York City and prior to joining Cornell, she knew some people that were also enrolling in the same term as she does.
During her High School years, Julia was part of both academic and cultural clubs and this is why she is eager to make new friendships through clubs as soon as she arrives at Cornell. Although Julia is disappointed because of the COVID pandemic and its impact on campus, she is excited about her first year at Cornell and wants to make the most out of her year.

During the first week when she arrived at Cornell, Julia made a few contacts with other people either during Orientation week or at her dorm. She wants to interact with other students that have the same interests and meet as many new people as possible. When thinking about other social goals, Julia also wants to feel a sense of belonging when joining a club. A good vibe
and a feeling of unity are some key aspects that she is looking to search for in different clubs. On the other hand, her professional goals for joining clubs are that she heard that she could add more to her resume and that the clubs are good for it. Moreover, some of the clubs at Cornell offer scholarships and this is one of the goals that Julia would like to accomplish.

When speaking about the behavior of our persona in order to achieve her goal, Julia went to the Clubfest to find about different clubs that she might be interested in. Although the experience wasn’t entirely satisfying, she still managed to get some connections with new people. In addition, Julia prefers creating a different network of people. Most of her interactions happen through friends that she already knows. This is where she also gets different club recommendations. Prior to joining Cornell, Julia joined a couple of GroupMe and Facebook
groups. She enjoyed this experience because it helped her settle in better and make new connections even before coming to Cornell. Julia found her current clubs through CampusGroups. She especially liked the functionality of the search function on the CampusGroups website since it allowed her to filter her interests better.

Although most of her experience was positive, Julia experienced some difficulties when trying to join different organizations at Cornell. First, the competitiveness of clubs is something that she hadn’t experienced before. During High School, all of her clubs were for academic or social interaction. However, she was surprised about the selectivity and application process for some clubs at Cornell and didn’t enjoy it. Furthermore, when finding a club of her interest, she had difficulties searching for specific information about it. The information about members of the club, time commitment, selectivity, or social aspects are some of the things that Julia failed to find on the club’s website that she wanted to know about. This information is crucial for her when making a decision whether to join a club or not.

Low-Fidelity Prototype

At this point, we have created low-fidelity paper prototypes based on the interviews that we ran and the persona that we had. Additionally, we have identified main 4 tasks based on the needs of our users that we believed would enable us to understand the potential final design solution even further. For each of the tasks, there was a scenario, storyboard, and UI associated with it. A task that I worked on, as UX Researcher, was ‘Find specific information about a club you are interested in, see other reviews or leave one. ‘ Below is the paper prototype of UI and storyboarding.

In addition to that, a paper prototype has been used to further evaluate our design and gather more insights from the users. I have created a paper prototype for all four tasks and those are documented in the Youtube video here.

High-Fidelity Prototype

Once we have successfully tested our paper prototype, we created a high-fidelity solution using Figma. Based on the whole human-centered design process that we ran, a prototype was made and later evaluated again by our users.

Tasks that we have identified remained the same because those allowed us to test both our paper and tech prototypes adequately. This youtube video that our team has created (and one of our members recorded) represents the ideal flow, and below are some of the images of the look of our app prototype.