duggy

1. Prototype

2. Describe your project: Duggy is a social networking app that connects you to your classmates and potential friends on campus, decreasing the anxiety and awkwardness involved in initial, real-life encounters that usually occur in dead-silent lecture halls or crowded office hours.

Have you ever struggled on a pset for hours but just couldn't seem to figure it out? Because all the TAs were sound asleep by 3 am and the threaded discussions were completely silent? Just when you finally bit the bullet and purchased Chegg, you realize that the answers you found are utterly useless, and the few friends you mustered up the courage to ask for help have still not responded-- what now?

Let us help. Save your grade AND warm your heart. Find new friends (or even your soulmate) on campus who actually want to help you succeed in your class.

*3. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words): * Every college student has probably struggled academically at some point, and our app aims to relieve the suffering even by just a little bit. From the moment my partner and I heard the prompt, we knew we wanted to create an app focused on students' academic performance. The first thing we did to better understand the problem was distributing a survey to students in the library: SURVEY LINK: We also consulted our online communities such as GroupMe and Sidechat to identify behavioral patterns rather than solely relying on responses from the MCQ survey. These were our major findings:

• 93.8% of college students surveyed believed that having a study buddy is beneficial to completing assignments.
• 81.3% of college students surveyed have difficulty going to office hours for help. 43% of this group expressed that the available OH times did not fit their schedule, and 25% answered that they were nervous.
• 50% of college students surveyed expressed that it is not easy to find friends and exchange contacts in their classes. 4. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)
• We had so, so many ideas. Our app idea kept getting bigger and bigger. At one point, my partner and I were trying to fit in discussion forums, threads, posts, direct messages, study buddy matches, friendship matches, a search engine, etc. into our UI, but we realized that these design decisions were getting increasingly careless. We were trying to fit too many features into a single page that at one point, we were basically assembling puzzle pieces without actually thinking about the user, and so we deicded that these features were unnecessary to the app's core mission: to find study buddies based on proximity and availability. We simplified the app's functionality to focus on finding new study buddies and maintaining relationships with established buddies instead.
• We also wanted to make sure to make safety a priority. For this study-buddy and friendship system to work, we wanted all users to be verified students, which meant using some kind of authentication system. Although common, we decided not to use manual sign-up processes and instead, chose to offer sign-up/login through existing student email accounts that could quickly be verified-- especially Google Authenticator-- which we believe would feel habitual and safe due to Google's credibility.
• Since Duggy is a social networking platform, we wanted to the app to have a social media-esque feel rather than appearing too "business-y" (ex:Quizlet, Chegg) or social (ex: TikTok). To achieve this, users have a lot of flexibility with customizing their profile with selfies and choosing interests, but we centered most of the focus on academics-- grades, current courses, past courses, GPA, and academic interests.
• Lastly, we wanted to use the location feature to also match users with students outside of their affiliated institution. Although incorporating this feature has potential to expose students to many new experiences and unique friendships, we felt that it was outweighed by concerns of safety. Additionally, circling back to the original purpose of the app, we want to help students succeed academically. Colleges are not identical, therefore we felt that there was a high chance most courses would not align with courses from other institutions due to instructor and curriculum differences -- thus the feature would not be as beneficial compared to arguments of safety and convenience.

*Attached is our link to the figma prototype and our mini case study. Thank you ~ *

Built With

• figma
• notability
• notion