UniSync

1. Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) Link

2. Currently, no app streamlines connections among students in their schools for professional and academic purposes. UniSnyc addresses this gap, providing a platform beyond these constraints. Our application facilitates student connections based on major, classes, and organizations. The user's profile page showcases their academic and professional journey, highlighting taken classes and active organizations. This serves as a valuable resource for others interested in career paths and skills gained during internships. Additionally, students can connect and chat, creating a dynamic space for knowledge exchange. Whether seeking advice on coursework, exploring career paths, or delving into industry insights, the chat options foster a collaborative and supportive community within the app.

3. For our research process and findings, we wanted to practice design thinking. For us, this meant prioritizing and empathizing with our potential users. Therefore, we began by brainstorming problems we and our friends faced on campus. In line with IDEO’s seven rules of brainstorming, we initially came up with a huge list of problems and eventually narrowed it down to the top three. Our process for narrowing these ideas down was simple: We aimed to understand the why, when, and how of each problem. We tossed the idea if we struggled to answer the three questions above. This left us with three problems, and once we narrowed that down, we interviewed a couple of our friends and came up with our final problem statement: Undergraduate students need a way to gain insights and share experiences because students find it difficult to expand beyond current social networks.

With a problem statement locked in, we brainstormed questions to ask potential users. Once again, we wanted to empathize with our consumers and felt the best way to achieve this was through user interviews. The following list includes all the questions we planned on asking:

• What resources do you use to help with course registration?
• How do you learn about a course or internship without a direct connection to it?
• How do you get advice from others on school, career options, networking, recruitment, etc? What do you use to do so? What do you/don’t you like about this?
• Would you be interested in connecting with people outside your existing social circles? What makes you receptive or not receptive?
• Do you feel restricted to your current social network?
• Do you usually reach out to people to ask about classes, organizations, jobs, etc?
• How often do you use LinkedIn to reach out to your network?
• If you do use LinkedIn, why do you use it over other platforms?
• If you don’t, why not? What do you use instead?
• Are you more incentivized to connect with a recent grad from your school on LinkedIn?
• When adding a new class, what is the reason for adding that specific class? Did you reach out to someone for information on the class?
• What helps you figure out what classes and organizations are right for you?
• How comfortable are you with contacting other undergraduate students for advice?
• What would help you reach out to others for advice/help?
• Are there any concerns about connecting with others through a mobile app?

We called 15 people collectively and spent approximately 15-20 minutes interviewing each of them. The notes from these interviews helped us create a basic user flow for our solution based on the overlap from all interviews. Essentially, we discovered that getting advice from students you weren’t friends with was difficult or daunting; however, there was a significant need for it. From there, we identified and prioritized various features, including a message system, discovery page, and casual profile.

1. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

When designing the app, we thought of various ways to organize information but settled on our three main tabs: Home, Chat, and Profile. Since the app's main focus is to connect undergraduate students to other students who have experience or are involved in the user's area of interest, the home page shows the profiles of other students and what the student is interested in. Within the home page, students can search for others who have anything connected with what is being searched. For example, if a student searches for the word "Informatics," students who have taken Informatics classes or done anything related to the field of informatics will pop up. From there, students can look at others' profiles and decide whether they want to message them or not. Since we are helping students reach out to others, we needed a page to track the communication happening. For this reason, the chat tab holds all the chats the students have. At the same time, it holds any notifications the student may have received. Notifications are for whenever the student is mentioned or tagged. Finally, students need a way to see what other students have done to decide whether to reach out to them. This is where profiles come in. Students can add their interests, classes they have taken, organizations they are a part of, and any work experience. All students will have these sections and be available for others to see.

Built With

• figma