UniRediscover
Video-conferencing application
2024
Brief
At the height of COVID-19, university orientations moved online.
We designed a video conferencing tool that emulates real-life orientations by allowing for private conversations, customisable layouts and virtual campus tours.
My role
User experience design, prototyping, user interviews, user testing, branding
DISCOVER
THE PROBLEM: VIRTUAL STUDENT ORIENTATIONS ARE BORING, AWKWARD AND FORGETTABLE.
...according to the 25 students we surveyed and 5 facilitators we interviewed.
DEFINE
User personas
From our research interviews. we found two types of users.
Participant
New to the school
Looks forward to making friends
Unfamiliar with campus layout
Facilitator
Part of the orientation committee
Hopes to help incoming students find friends and have fun
How might we...
support organic conversations between users?
increase visibility without being intrusive?
make virtual tours more effective for participants?
DESIGN
The solution
Simulate user movement in a virtual space
Reproduce in-person conversations with proximity chat
Support customisable layouts
First explorations
First, we ran a Crazy Eights exercise to ideate on the app’s layout.
From those ideas, we designed a lo-fi prototype on Miro to test with our target users.
Lo-fi prototype
user’s video feed
users can use WASD to explore the space
users can talk to others when their proximity circles overlap
customise the virtual space layout
D
A
S
W
User testing
After testing with 4 users using the Wizard of Oz method, we identified 3 areas for improvement.
Testing results
Users can’t find the ‘Expand Radius’ slider, and don’t understand what it does.
The concept of proximity chat is foreign to users in this context.
Users find it tedious to manually recreate their campus in the Build Mode.
Redesign
Back to the drawing board: we completed another round of iteration based on the user testing results.
1
Removed the ‘Expand Radius’ function to adjust their proximity radii.
2
In “Tour Mode”, proximity radii now adjusts itself to accommodate all the other users.
3
Designed a variety of room templates to speed up map customisation.
DELIVER
Final design
I designed the final mid-fi prototype in Figma, with minor UI changes.
By removing the ‘Expand Radius’ slider, user behaviour can more realistically emulate in-person actions: if you wanted to talk to someone, you’d probably move towards them instead of shouting across the room.
This freed up more space to group the functions along the task bar, shaping the user’s mental model more efficiently.
Build Mode
With more templates and customisation options, users are able to recreate their campuses or simply use a pre-built space to host functions.
In the end...
This was my first end-to-end product design project, and it sparked my passion for user-centred design.
If there’s one thing I learned from this project: I am not my user. Every interview or test taught us something new, and each round of iteration brought us closer to a product that served the needs of its target users.
Thank you to my working group for the guidance, hard work and good goofs!
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