Hive

Prototype link

Link

Describe your project:

Hive is a community-driven map app tailored for undergraduate students, empowering them with real-time information to make informed decisions in their daily lives. The dynamic live map facilitates two key functions: event registration with precise location tagging and live reactions to places on campus, like parties and hazardous areas. Students actively contribute by reporting crowd levels at study spots, party updates, and free food opportunities around campus. Personalization is central to this app as users are enabled to customize their experience by selecting interests for specific alerts, such as live reactions to gym crowd levels if they’re avid gym rats or whether parties are popping off if they attend parties frequently but refuse to walk across to check. By fostering a community-driven platform, our app transforms the student experience through providing timely and accurate information for students to be empowered to navigate campus dynamics with ease and confidence.

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.

User Interviews: For our user research, we conducted 8 user interviews with students at Rice University regarding the current methods they utilize to stay informed about events or alerts on campus and how frequently they seek information about the busyness of on-campus places. Some of our interview questions included “Can you share an experience when you wish you had real-time information about the crowd/ busyness levels at a specific location on campus?”, “What are some pain points or concerns you might have with having a community-driven navigation app?”, and “What features do you think would be essential in an app that provides more information about campus events and crowd levels/impacted areas?”

What many of these interviews revealed is the problem students often face when trying to obtain the information needed to inform daily decisions. Oftentimes, there is an information overload because there are so many platforms for information that to know everything, you need to be on social media, email lists, etc. In many of our interviews, students highlighted that they want to be able to check the busyness of places if they have a fifteen or thirty minute break during their day to go to the gym or get coffee. Using current methods, students find themselves missing events or staying in their room due to laziness to check crowd levels.

In addition, our interviews clearly revealed to us what was important to students, including the busyness of study spots, gym, and parties. To answer our question about suggested features for an app like this, students mentioned a filtering system or search bar for students only looking for study spots/other interests as well as the time a specific event might disappear, like club meetings or parties.

Survey Overview: To begin our user research, we conducted a Google Form survey: We surveyed 60 students from 16 universities across the nation. We used a likert scale with ‘strongly agree and strongly disagree’ extremes to receive input on the statements: ‘I am interested in having an app to know what spots on campus are popular at the moment’, ‘I wish there was a way to know if a place is empty/full before going (the rec, study spots, party)’ and ‘If such an app existed, I would contribute to it by reporting the status of the place I am in at the time (busy, empty, no car access, hot party, cold party)’. We chose these questions to better understand potential interest and adherence to the community-report system. 64.8% of participants strongly agree they wish there was a way to better understand the occupancy and crowdedness of spaces, however only 25% strongly agreed that they would contribute to the report system. Lastly, we asked participants to write a short text with tags that would be useful for them, and the most common responses were: busyness of: serveries, gym and study spots; free food events; safety Alerts: elevators not working, safety concern zone; Hazards, Protests, and Pop-ups.

Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions?

Search Bar Feature: A majority of our interviewees mentioned that a helpful feature they would suggest was a filtering system or search bar where instead of mindlessly scrolling through the map, they could filter out whatever the user wants to see through the search bar feature. The example we included in our walkthrough was a common issue our interviewees discussed, which was knowing the busyness of study spots. Through our project, students would be able to search “study spots” and have all of the crowd levels of each study spot on campus consolidated into one spot, therefore decreasing the amount of time wasted finding study spots that are less busy. Additionally, if users click on the study spot, they can see live comments and reactions with time stamps to let people know that information about that specific location is being updated in real-time.

Differing Tag Sizes: In our research we found that it was important for the app to be up to date. In order to accomplish this we decided to make the tag size dependent on when it was posted. The bigger the tag, the more recently it was posted. We found that size allowed the user to more easily comprehend information vs. time stamps.

Color Choices and Theme: We chose bright, primary colors for all of the symbols on the map in order to supply easier visibility for users. Among each of the reactions, there is a consistent usage of red for bad/busy, yellow for meh/medium, and green for good/empty. We used these vibrant colors for simplicity and user-friendliness. Specifically, regarding our logo name “Hive” and the color yellow that is used throughout our design palette, we chose this app name because it symbolizes the hive mentality, which is defined as groupthink — when a person has a strong tendency to fall for group decision-making. We chose to display multiple honeycombs on our app’s logo to symbolize the sense of a close, tight-knit homebase/campus community that is associated with various young students residing in one area.

Flow of App and Format: Why did we choose a community-driven map vs. a list of events? This design decision was driven by the desire to foster a sense of unity and belonging among undergraduate students on campus. Being enabled to visually see others engaging with the campus through activities pinned on the map and being in places that students are familiar with creates a unique connection as it cultivates a shared experience for the users. The decision to empathize reactions and encourage live reporting serves the community by fostering interactions and a collective spirit of “We’re all in this together!” This design isn’t solely about discovering new events, it’s primarily aimed at providing real-time information to inform daily decisions and plans, ensuring that users feel connected, informed, and like they’re actively contributing to the campus environment. Our design choices are essentially rooted in enhancing the student experience through visual engagement and community-driven participation.

Built With

• figma