Mission Covid-19

Overview

Team

Problem Statement

Solution

We created a mobile digital world full of activities that students could participate in while having the option to remain virtual or meet up while following social distancing guidelines.

Process

Role

UX designer,

UX researcher

Date

Sep. 2020 - Nov. 2020

Diego Maldonado

Lynn Huynh

Alice Li

Joanne Tsao

In the isolating time created by the onset of the pandemic, students seek ways to stay connected to each other amidst the restrictions brought on by the pandemic. We wanted to find a way for students to participate in activities while having the option to remain virtual or meet up while following social distancing guidelines.

Research

Generative User Interviews

We began our research by conducting qualitative interviews with undergraduate students attending the University of Texas at Austin. We found that many students had moved back home since the pandemic hit, and the only in-person social interaction they were getting was with family, which had its own pros and cons. Students were staying occupied by revisiting old hobbies or trying their hand at new ones. Although our participants wanted to see their friends again, they understood the restrictions on social gatherings and wanted to uphold those guidelines. Many people mentioned that they were attempting to stay in touch with friends through texting, calling, and online virtual activities.

Ideation

Persona

Our persona represents the average University of Texas at Austin undergraduate student one might encounter on campus. We wanted to tailor our app to meet the needs of the local college students in our area.

User Journey

Design + Testing

Charting user emotions during this period of time, as well as the specific needs occurring at each stage allowed us to see the pain points our designs should address and what functions we could incorporate into our application.

Wireframing

Using Figma, we first started off with simple frames that held the basic functions we wanted our application to have which were:

A community portal with various activities users could engage in solo or with friends.
A customization page where users could create their own avatar.
A home screen with a personal room type setup that users could add virtual furniture to.
A mission type system where users would be awarded points for completing activities and able to use the points to redeem items.

Usability Tests

We reached out to 3 undergraduate college students and asked them to perform tasks within the application so that we could uncover areas that needed to be changed and improved.

Participants were asked to:

Join and create an avatar.
Access the rewards obtained from completing missions.
Find a community activity to participate in.
View personal profile.

Findings

We were able to gather several key insights from our users:

Navigation needed to be more streamlined.
The naming given to each function should be considered, as it could alter user perception.
Having too many functions on the application could overwhelm the users.

Our team decided to address the navigational issues by adding consistent buttons across pages that would allow the user to easily return to the home screen or to the previous page. We made sure to refer to common apps on our phones to get an idea of common naming schemes we should use for the functions on our application to clear up any user confusion over their meaning. Lastly, we took out the "self-care" and "track-health" reminders so that our app would be more focused on the social activities and game aspect.

Final Prototype

Our final prototype makes use of futuristic schemes and the cool tones of varying shades of blue and black to give users the impression of being somewhere new. The app's main functions include a community activities section, a customizable avatar, a customizable room-like home screen, and a missions section that can be completed solo or with a friend.

Try out our full prototype here!

Takeaways

Working with a team of talented designers taught me a lot about how to to create a beautiful interface within a limited scope. Due to this project being part of a 5 week class, we had to research and iterate rapidly. To improve upon this design, I would take the following next steps:

Ensure the design of the app follows WCAG guidelines for accessibility.
Conduct more usability tests.
Finish implementing the functions our team decided to focus on after the last usability test.

Through this design, I learned the importance of:

Focusing on a few key functions, rather than overloading an application with multitudes of things to do.
Ensuring the language and vocabulary in use lines up with the user's definition.