Overview
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Meetzap is a mobile platform designed to allow college students to connect with other students on campus and make new friends
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Project DescriptionAlmost everyone probably remembers their move-in day their freshman year. They could have been feeling all sorts of emotions: excited all the way to nervous and overwhelmed. In the transition to college, are often moving away from their friends, parents, and siblings for the first time. My team and I worked on a solution to answer the question "How might we increase face-to-face interactions and build community among students living in the UW residence halls?". We conducted extensive research exploring the needs and values of college students and designed a new mobile application to help increase the sense of community in the residence halls while helping foster in-person connections.
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Project Details
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Club: Design for America UW (October 2019 - June 2020)
Type: Mobile UX Design Tools: Affinity Diagrams, Surveys, Semi-Structured Interviews, Figma, InVision, Illustrator Role: While having worked on all aspects of the project, I was most heavily involved in research and analysis, ideation, usability testing, and creating the interactive prototype. I was also the primary designer for Offline Mode, Home, Events, and Announcements. Meetzap was a yearlong project for Design for America UW, a Registered Student Organization at the University of Washington that aims to solve social problems in the UW community. As a UX Designer, we looked at the design questions posed by the Project Leads and applied for the project we were most interested in. Want to learn more? Scroll down to learn more about the mobile application as well as the process we took to create our final application and presentation! |
Design Process
ResearchBased on the design question proposed, we conducted surveys and interviewed our stakeholders. This included students, professional staff, Resident Advisors, and other student leaders. We spent 2 weeks crafting interview and survey questions for our stakeholders. Over the following 2 months, we conducted more than 100 surveys. We had over 90 students and 15 student leaders respond to our survey to assess the overall values, views, and pain points of our user group. We followed up this survey with 6 student (and student leader) interviews and 4 professional staff interviews to confirm our survey findings and ask some more in-depth questions.
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Research AnalysisAfter 3 months of data collection, we spent 2 weeks analyzing the data received. We broke up the data into separate categories. Each group member took insights from the surveys and interviews from our respective categories and created one overall affinity diagram, looking at the insights from all the groups. The common themes between our insights helped us discover the common values and pain points for students living in the residence hall.
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Key Insights
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Design PrinciplesInformed by our research findings, we came up with 4 major design principles to provide guidance for our final solution.
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Ideation Part 1: Type of SolutionFollowing our design principles, each member ideated our own potential solutions and then we all came together to create an affinity diagram of solutions. After some discussion and debate, our group decided to create a mobile application to tackle our users' pain points. While a mobile application may seem counter-intuitive as a solution for creating in-person interactions, the connections that users can make through the application can lead to face-to-face interactions!
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Ideation Part 2: Mobile Application IdeationOnce we decided to create a mobile application, we each designed our own idea for the application for divergent ideation and then came together to discuss our solutions. We looked at each solution through the lens of our design principles and looked at strengths and weaknesses. Each solution had strong points, so our final idea was a combination of multiple sketches. Our final idea included personalized methods that allowed users to communicate with other residents and student staff, meet new people, and foster in-person interactions.
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Low Fidelity Wireframes & Usability TestingWe now got to prototype our app on a screen! We digitized our mobile screens, focusing on the flow and information on the app. This was done to create a basic version so that we could run usability testing on 10 potential users. By showing the app to our target audience and get their feedback, I could make sure that the app was not only meeting their goals, but was appealing to them as well.
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High Fidelity Mock Ups
The feedback received from usability testing was integrated when we created high fidelity mock ups that included color and other fine details to make our screen more visually appealing. The group discussed the impact of our color and typography choice while debating the use of pictures versus avatars for profiles and other fine details. Our mock ups were designed to represent what the final application will look like. The mock ups act as a complete application that can be used so that users could see the full functionality and feel of what they could be using in the future.
Meetzap Login
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Meetzap Home
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Meetzap Matches
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Meetzap Meet Up Now
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Meetzap Chat
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Meetzap Offline
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Meet Meetzap
Main Features
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Your Matches
One of the primary features of Meetzap is meeting new people. Our match feature uses the profile to match the user with students who are similar or different to them, depending on user preferences. The goal of this match feature is to reduce the anxiety of introducing yourself to a stranger in the hallway while also opening up possibilities to meet students outside the user’s residence hall. |
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Meet Up Now
Students may be looking for a friend to grab lunch with or got to an event with, but are afraid of publicly asking someone to go with them. With "Meet Up Now", the user can select how many people they want to meet up with, when and where they want to meet up, and for what activity. When the system finds a match, the user will receive a notification and invitation to chat. |
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Meetzap Offline
Offline is a mode that users can turn on when meeting up with their connections in-person. It provides conversation starters, but most importantly, it discourages phone use, helping users to build a better and stronger connection. To encourage users to meet each other in person, the longer Offline Mode is enabled, the more points users can get to redeem prizes! |
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Final Expo PosterAt the end of our yearlong project, we presented our application at our annual Expo covering our design process and introducing Meetzap! To view our poster from the Expo, click on the button below!
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Interactive PrototypeTest the Interactive Prototype on the Right to navigate through Meetzap!
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Reflection
As a former Orientation Leader, a current Resident Advisor, and an Honors Community Ambassador, this project was special to me. I have previously worked with incoming students and saw the challenges that they face finding community. However, I made sure I was keeping my own experiences and biases in check to make sure I wasn't influencing the results.
While designing, the team had a lot of spirited and constructive debates. From our navigation bar to choosing avatars over pictures, we made each decision with a lot of thought in order to make sure the application was not only user-friendly, but inviting, intuitive, and modern. Overall, we created an application that meets the needs of the users in the most effective manner. As we look to the future, we hope to expand our application. We want to expand our offline experience options to allow for more activities and events and do some final stage usability testing to make sure it meets the needs of students. Meetzap is especially critical now because the incoming freshmen lost their in-person orientation due to COVID-19, taking away their first major chance at community building. In the future, we hope to find more partners on more campuses.
While designing, the team had a lot of spirited and constructive debates. From our navigation bar to choosing avatars over pictures, we made each decision with a lot of thought in order to make sure the application was not only user-friendly, but inviting, intuitive, and modern. Overall, we created an application that meets the needs of the users in the most effective manner. As we look to the future, we hope to expand our application. We want to expand our offline experience options to allow for more activities and events and do some final stage usability testing to make sure it meets the needs of students. Meetzap is especially critical now because the incoming freshmen lost their in-person orientation due to COVID-19, taking away their first major chance at community building. In the future, we hope to find more partners on more campuses.