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.
User experience design, prototyping, user interviews, user testing, branding
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THE PROBLEM: VIRTUAL STUDENT ORIENTATIONS ARE BORING, AWKWARD AND FORGETTABLE.
...according to the 25 students we surveyed and 5 facilitators we interviewed.
From our research interviews. we found two types of users: the Participant and the Facilitator.
New to the school
Looks forward to making friends
Unfamiliar with campus layout
Part of the orientation committee
Hopes to help incoming students find friends and have fun
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.
After testing with 4 users using the Wizard of Oz method, we identified 3 areas for improvement.
Back to the drawing board: we completed another round of iteration based on the user testing results.
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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.
With more templates and customisation options, users are able to recreate their campuses or simply use a pre-built space to host functions.
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!
