Project Social Inclusivity
HCI Design
Tools: Invision + Balsamiq + Microsoft Word + Powerpoint
August 2018 - December 2018
Human-Computer Interaction Design Course / Team Project
Overview
PROBLEM
It’s hard to socialize with other students on campus!
Students at Cornell University tend to have a hard time socializing with other students. Often this is due to academic strains that limit their social life, as well as the atmosphere of the college community that make space for socializing. For example, students within interest-based organizations such as sports teams, clubs, fraternities, or sororities tend to limit their social groups to peers within these spaces.
SOLUTION
CVENTS, the app for campus social events.
CVENTS is an event app where Cornell students can find social events happening on campus. These events will be organized with the goal of promoting an atmosphere of socialization and inclusivity. Students can search for events that may or may not align with their interests.
Methods:
Contextual Interviews, Affinity Diagramming, Storyboarding, Prototyping
Team :
Aidan Weed , Gaby Maurice , Grace Okunubi, Samuel Williams
Role
My role within this project was similar to all other team members. This including acting a facilitator for the interviews, participating in design ideation, and functioning as designer for all prototypes.
Design Process
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1.Generative Research
Following our initial brainstorming session we decided the focus of this project would be social interactions at Cornell. We wanted to know how hard (or easy) it was for a student at Cornell to make connections. This may be making friends or forming a relationship with someone. To help us gauge these interactions we performed contextual interviews.
Contextual Interviews
Understanding the social lives of students on campus.
During these 25-45 minutes sessions, participants were asked various impersonal to personal question relating to their social lives. These questions were divided into various types: Culture at Cornell, Social Network Questions, and Dating Specific Questions.
Following the interviews, we compiled all of the data and began to analyze and organize the data into groups for the affinity diagram. We came up with seven major clusters from the data.
Affinity diagrams
Demographics cluster - mainly made up of information about the user such as field of study, year, what Cornell community they identified the most with, and hometown.
The dating cluster - grouped the responses about romantic relationships on campus, campus hookup culture, and whether or not people believed that it was possible to start a romantic relationship online.
The Personality cluster - a collection of unique answers that participants gave to questions we asked.
Clubs/Organizations cluster - where a lot of the interviewees expressed the opinion that organizations with an audition or rush process made Cornell campus less inclusive.
The Friendships cluster - refers to how the interviewees maintain friendships on campus and which friendships they devote more time to and why.
The Social Dynamics cluster - interviewees' opinion about inclusivity on Cornell campus, common responses in this cluster were that while it’s easy to meet people on campus, the campus is divided into little groups.
2. Design Ideation
Using the data collected during the contextual interview as well as the clusters derived from the affinity diagram, we created a persona to define a target audience and their expectations.
Persona
Karen's Personality
Solution Space
After defining our persona, we performed an analysis on existing solutions that could aid in mitigating our focus problem. Some well know solutions that influence social interactions include:
Relationships
Apps like Tinder and Bumble target the problems of the difficulty in finding a partner by allowing people of various, backgrounds, races, sexual orientations and socioeconomic statuses have access to others looking for relationships on these dating apps.
Networking
Social Networks, on and offline like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Clubs and organizations like Greek Life, pre-professional organizations, and affinity groups are other ways to address loneliness.
In-person events also are a way for people to meet each other and increase their social networks.
Idea Generation
For this stage of the project each group member was responsible for coming up with 20 ideas of solutions that can be used to address our problem. During the following brainstorming session each member would share their best three solutions with the rest of the group.
Takeaways
After compiling all our ideas, we noted any overlapping concepts or features that may be represented in the final prototype. Through our idea generation sessions we came away with these final takeaways:
Our solution will be an event-based app
Users will be able to see Cornell events on the app
Users can filter events by interests and expectations.
Users will also have the opportunity to see who else is going to these events through a “guest list”.
These takeaways should accommodate many of the needs and wants of our persona.
Design Concept
We came up with four tasks for the design concept:
Finding Events
RSVPing to an event
Viewing attendee list
Creating a profile
We narrowed down our previous list of tasks to these four ideas because they were the most applicable to increasing social inclusivity on campus.
STORYBOARDS
Karen searching for a party storyboard
Viewing attendees storyboard
Creating a Profile storyboard
3. Protoype & Evaluate
Low-Fidelity Paper Prototyping
Using facets of our persona, scenarios, and tasks, my team and I designed a paper prototype for our solution. We used this paper prototype and its accompanying UI sketches to perform various tasks that we have outlined in the previous module. This task represent usability from the perspective of our persona, Karen.
Create a profile screen
We used sticky notes to changed to us, defined by a user’s input.
Event listing screen
Demo
Evaluation
To test this prototype we recruited a new diverse group of three users to walk through the prototype. Based on this user feedback, we made some of the suggested changes to the prototype. These changes included:
Making the profile less extensive.
Increase the scope of the solution space to target loneliness.
One common response was that our solution many not necessarily affect social inclusivity. Therefore, we had to make necessary adjustments to make sure that our solution addresses this central issue.
Mid-fidelity Balsamiq Prototype
After testing our UI sketches, we created a mid-fidelity prototype of our app using Balsamiq. The primary tasks that we created on our Balsamiq prototype included:
Allowing users to finding an event
Allowing users to create a profile
Allowing users to RSVP to an event
Allowing users to view attendees for an event.
Some design decisions that were made for the Balsamiq prototype were:
Clicking outside a text popup to exit instead of using a “back” button
Color contrasting the different event categories
Organizing all the events in boxes down the screen.
Evaluation
To evaluate this prototype, each group member did a heuristic evaluation of the features of this prototype. We defined which of these feature violated heuristics, and decided whether we would make changes based on the severity of the violation and time cost.
Some changes we made were :
Adding an option to edit profiles.
Adding confirmation pages.
Allow the user to cancel an RSVP.
Error prevention after certain actions.
High Fidelity Invision Prototype
Through our heuristic evaluations, we came up with a fair amount of different changes to the UI. Some of these changes include:
Minor tweaks including positioning on the screen and color changes
Changes to the nav bar and the removal of some required profile information.
There were a few cases where we needed to add additional buttons to allow different affordances.
On the profile tab, we added a button for the user to edit their profile.
We added + buttons on the attendee lists for parties to allow users to add people who were attending the party.
Usability Testing Plan
We then came up with a usability plan. For each task, we created an ideal happy path that the user would follow to complete each task, made the notetaking guide, came up with the metrics we would use which include social connectedness, effectiveness, think-out-loud method, efficiency, and emotional engagement.
We wrote out the happy path for each task, and then created post survey questions for each user as well.
Demo
Findings
We settled on three major change:
Improving the search functionality.
Changing the information architecture for the profile page.
Adding an Upcoming Events page.
Some minor changes include:
Standardizing the colors
Changing the font, redesigning the navigation bar
Adding a notification for the host when a user RSVPs
Adding an “Interested” button.
4. Final Design
Introducing…CVENTS,
the event app for Cornell students. Through our mission on advancing social inclusivity, CVENTS allows Cornell students and organizations to advertise their events on our platform. Cornell students will then be able to find and attend these various events. What makes this event app different from others is its policy for social inclusivity. Event organizers will be advised on building spaces where everyone feels welcomed, and where students are able to from meaningful connect with the others they meet.
Design rationale
The color palette for the app design conveys a subtle and relaxed atmosphere to the app. When a user logs onto the platform we wanted them to feel welcomed, being that the goal of the app is to promote inclusivity in all aspects of event-going. Users should also be able to better accomplish the various tasks outlined in the usability test from previous prototypes from the improved contrast and visual hierarchy of elements.
Color Palette