Reimagining the DePaul Alumni Sharing Knowledge (ASK) network as a mobile app experience by using the principles of social interaction designing
Intent:
Proposal to senior management at workplace & Social Interaction Design coursework
Role:
Research, user-interviews, wireframing & prototyping, lo-fi, mid-fi, hi-fi designing, usability testing
Tools:
Figma, Pen & paper
Duration:
10 weeks
Team:
Individual
I worked with the DePaul ASK Network department for 2 years as a Program & Communications Assistant. I was responsible for advocating the ASK network, an online mentoring tool that connects students and alumni. ASK is hosted on a platform called PeopleGrove. Presently, the platform is designed for the web and is not fully mobile-friendly.
Informed by my interactions with alumni and students over 2 years, I designed a mobile app version of ASK for my coursework for the social interaction design class. This project is my take on how the app would look and function on a mobile device. All the features and functionalities presented are based on what students said they would like to see in a mobile app that lets them connect with other students and alumni to network and seek mentorship.
DePaul ASK Network is a program run by the Career Center with the primary purpose of helping students connect with alumni to seek guidance and mentorship for college support and discovering careers. In its current form, new or less experienced students cannot connect with more experienced students of DePaul. Also, there is no sense of instant gratification among students who have used the network in the past. I identified this as an opportunity to make the mentoring network at DePaul a bit more social and inclusive, to drive a sense of belonging among students and alumni.
Based on insights from my job role and the data usage gathered from the existing website, I designed the DePaul ASK Network as a social media mobile app. The presented solution focuses on students and their journey through the app.
Here's introducing the new DePaul ASK Network mobile app, a community enabling social networking app for knowledge exchange among students and alumni of DePaul.
One of the inherent human activities is collecting, which can help in achieving personal identity and a nurturing hobby to make one feel good, safe, and loved. The new app feature–Diary, allows students to collect advice from various posts across their home feed and add pieces of advice to a personal diary. This mimics the real-word habit of note-taking.
The home feed Wall of Advice is the answer to quick, just-in-time advice that does not need long-term formal mentoring. Students can post a question and even control who can respond to their post. The personalized home feed with user-generated content makes the app sticky, generates repeated app visits, increases engagement, and promotes a sense of social community.
The network tab recommends mentors based on industry preferences and lets students connect with mentors quickly and easily. The messaging and schedule call features integrate Google tools like Google Meet, Google Hangouts, and Google Translate. Students also have the option of searching for more mentors using simple filters.
Students can use the search option in the network tab to search for mentors using keywords. 2 levels of filters can be set and are as follows:
A high-level filter to view the results by type of mentor
A search-results level filter for narrowing down options
In the following sections, I will explain the steps I took throughout my process to arrive at the final design solution. I will also explain my rationale behind the design decisions.
Solving any problem requires getting to the root of the problem, understand the exact requirements of the users, and then come up with a solution. I started by conducting some secondary research to complement and inform the insights I gathered while working with students and alumni as a part of my job responsibility at the ASK department.
Findings
To dig deeper about the discoverability and reaching out to mentors on the website, I relied on qualitative data from the interviews in conjunction with the results from the usability tests.
I asked 5 students to explore the network tab and discover a mentor they would like to reach using their mobile phones.
Findings:
My goal from the one-on-one interviews was to identify student requirements and their barriers from a mobile app that would let them connect with peers and alumni for advice. The core findings are as follows:
“I feel rushed or pushed when my school asks me to do it. It shouldn’t be an obligation”
“I wish there was a place where I could just type out my experiences that can be advice for new students. You know, like a Twitter feed”
“I’ve been in their shoes before. If my advice can help them not make the mistakes I made, I'm happy to help”
Next, I used the insights generated to come up with a persona to guide my design decisions
I conducted a quick competitive analysis of how recommendations or matching happens on other apps. I looked at Bumble Bizz, Linkedin, and Facebook
Bumble connection building process is like dating
Facebook uses a search-based connection building process using filters
LinkedIn has a recommendations page and search feature
After I gathered insights and identified the barriers, I started brainstorming on paper to collate all my thoughts and set some goals to achieve with my design
Based on what I had gathered from research and my analysis using affinity mapping, I set some high level goals to achieve with the design. I also made a list of features that I though were feasible for a mobile app version of the university's mentoring solution
Goals:
Features:
After few pencil sketches, I moved to Figma to continue wireframing. I focused on some key user flows and used wireframing to think through the flows. Shown below are 3 of the most important flows
Design rationale:
The initial idea for the onboarding was to gather important information from the users and use that data to present them with a home feed customized to their needs. For this purpose, I decided to collect their interest areas, industries they were interested in, and what kind of advice they were going to seek. To help them get started with their profile page, a profile pic and a note about what advice they wanted were collected as a part of the onboarding process.
Design rationale:
To mimic the real-world habit of note-taking, I designed a feature where students can save advice from across their home feed to a diary section in the app which acts like a personal diary that the students can revisit anytime.
Design rationale:
Students wanted networking to be very easy with few barriers. I designed the networking flow to be supportive. Students can either send a message or schedule a call from multiple locations in the app during their journey. While sending the first message, students can use email template guides based on their goals to craft a message.
1) They can use various filters to search for mentors and message them directly from the Network tab
2) They can either message a mentor or schedule a meeting directly from any mentor's profile page
3) They can also schedule a meeting from the messages tab in the app
I used Figma and quickly prototyped each flow at every stage of designing and followed a task-based testing approach. I tested the 3 flows with 5 users by giving them tasks to achieve. I conducted 2 rounds of testing– one mif-fi prototypes and another with hi-fi prototypes.
The final changes made and implemented in the hi-fi designs are as follows:
The home screen feed
The Network Tab
The Mentor Profile Page
This was an individual project. I was the only UX designer and I proactively redesigned a web only mentoring network interface that I was managing professionally, towards my coursework of the Social Interaction Design course and even presented it to the senior management at the workplace.
The goal for this project was to design the ASK Network as an Android app by using the knowledge of social interaction design patterns. All the design decisions presented have been informed by research and by common social media interaction patterns.
I thoroughly enjoyed using real world habits as design inspirations and implementing them to solve problems students face while using a powerful tool like the ASK Network.
