Buddies is an app made for first-year international students, offering a platform for international students venturing out of their cultural bubbles and connecting with students from other nationalities.
Let's Talk about the Process
1 — PainPoint: What is stopping first-year international students from making domestic friends?
With the increasing number of international students at Cornell, we've noticed a separation between first-year international students and domestic students.
Although universities like Cornell are eager to offer services to aid in the process of intercultural communication and cultural integration, first-year international students barely venture out of their cultural bubble.
To further learning about intrinsic factors, we conducted a series of interviews, created affinity diagrams to synthesize our findings, and identified a persona serving as the focus of our design.
Persona
Key Findings
Language Barriers
For international students, the language barrier is the major hindrance to initiate a conversation with domestic students
Encouragement/Common Interests
Interviewees indicated that they are more likely to establish friendships with others sharing the common interests
Information Access
Filtered or tailored activity recommendations will are more attractive to users
2 — Brainstorm: From online services to non-technological solutions
Jump into the users' shoes and really understand their needs from the personas, each of us carried out 20 design ideas, from applications to non-technological solutions.
After three rounds for our brainstorming and voting session, we picked the idea of the partner program from all 120 sketches, which responds well to the persona and requirement statement we created.
3 — Competitive Analysis: What are the existing solutions regarding our findings?
We analyzed six existing online services related to our three main findings
(Language barriers, event information access, encouragement/common interests)
Urban Dictionary
—Slang—
Meetup
—Time-based—
Nearify
—Distance-based—
Agnes.io
—Interest-based—
Facebook Events
—Popularity-based—
Pocket Points
—Coupon Rewards—
Urban Dictionary is intended as a dictionary of slang, or cultural words or phrases, not typically found in standard dictionaries.
Meetup prioritizes the ``Time`` factor. Events are gathered and then visualized in a calendar format, so that users are able to avoid time conflicts.
Check events near you by! Nearify prioritizes the ``Distance`` factor. The map is its main way to show events' information.
Agnes enables users to identify their interests, and recommends relevant and trending events in a feed.
Facebook Events displays friends’ interests in events and enables filtering events based on popularities among friends.
Pocket Points uses the ``coupon`` to motivate users to get rid of screens and to focus on workings
What insights could we incorporate into our design?
Schedule Sync
Interest-based
Categorized Events
Coupon Rewards
Distance Maps
Slang Tooltips
Sign up with school email. Sync course calendar automatically to avoid time conflict.
Select interests once when signing up. All events will be recommended based on your interests later on.
Events would be categorized into 10 groups based on interest categories.
Learn from the coupon business model. Use the coupon function as an encouragement for making friends.
As an intuitive way to show data, a map will be used to show coupons.
Offer users with slang tooltips in the chat function! Check cultural phrases without switching apps.
4 — Storyboards: Illustrate the possible interaction scenario
After synthesized the design spaces and the ideas, we narrowed down to the most important six tasks for a new mobile service — register, explore activities, create activities, coupons, chat, and schedule — and created six storyboards to illustrate the possible interaction scenario.
5 — Iterative Design
5.1 Paper Prototype & User Testing
According to our storyboards, we sketched a paper prototype and used it to run six think-aloud user testings. This process helped us evaluate our UI sketches and page structures.
User Testing, conducted by Stella Huang, Qi Zhang, Cristina Zhao, and Xu Jing
5.2 Mid-Fidelity & Heuristic Evaluation
Based on the user testing feedbacks, we adjusted some parts of the UI elements and functionalities of our app.
To examine our app's flow, We adopted Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics to run an experts evaluation. With the help of Nielsen’s heuristics, we were able to identify design problems with a more standardized and systematic approach.
We met a technical challenge in the Mid-Fi phase...
Apart from running the heuristics evaluation from a designer's perspective, I also tried to jump into a developer‘s shoes to evaluate our design. Then, I found a severe technical problem...
Our original matching method seems like a pool filled with preference forms
Our design requires every user to fill out a preference form before matching. After finishing the forms, the only thing users need to do is waiting for matching. The system will automatically match users up whose preferences fit well with each other. Such as Zhonghao wants to play basketball at 11 am in X court with an American guy, and Mike also wants to play basketball at 11 am in X court with an Asian guy. Then they'll get matched.
However, the success rate is very low... Some users might wait forever...
As more preference choices the form has, fewer chances that users can match with each other
In the beginning, green, yellow, and red all want to play badminton in a group of 3
After choosing time preferences, green cannot match with yellow and red anymore.
Even yellow and red are far away from each other after setting the date preferences.
How about decreasing preference choices to increase the matching success rate?
It's only feasible when we have a lot of active users, or decrease matching criteria(no need to be perfectly matched). But as a new product, we can't ensure we will attract a bunch of loyal users in a short time.
Eventually, we used the filter and made matching percentages visible to every user
Now, the system doesn't require users to fill out forms, and will automatically sort and prioritize activities based on users interests and available time slots.
Now, join the Buddies and enjoy your university life!
