Meechu
An app that matches college students with their classmates.
My Role
UX Designer, Researcher,
Visual Designer
Timeline
Aug. 2020 - Present
Team
1 × UX/UI Designer & 2 Researcher
4 Developers
Tools
Adobe XD
Adobe Illustrator
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BACKGROUND
College is a great place to meet people and form meaningful connections. However, many students are unable to take full advantage of this opportunity, for example, international students who are overwhelmed in the new environment or introverts who need some encouragement for socializing. Now, with the pandemic wreaking havoc, almost each one of us is influenced by social distancing in a way of building connections with fellow classmates.
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DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we help students to know people who not only take the same classes but also share similar interests, so that people could form meaningful and lasting relationships?
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Competitive Analysis
What are the Existing Modules?
To better understand how we could help our users, we first analyzed some existing modules.
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User Research
Research Goal
Throughout the research, we wish we can:
(1) Broaden our understanding and knowledge about students' current situations,
(2) Get insights on their needs, and finally,
(3) Explore opportunity spaces on how we can help students form meaningful connections easier.
Primary Research
In order to get an in-depth view on the issue, we sent out a survey on Aug. 28, 2020. We received 2343 responses and get chance to talk with 3 of our participants. Then we generated 3 insight and leveraged affinity diagram to analyze and make sense of the data we collected.
Persona
I created two personas based on our interviewees’ real story and feeling to emphasize their emotional frustrations to help us better understand their frustrations and build empathy.
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Synthesis
Insights to Design Implications
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Branding
Logo
Color
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Design
Wireframes
Typography
Meechu intends to give the feeling of both vibrant and encouraging. Its color palette contains a coral, a dark tangerine, and a floral white.
Meechu looks for a typeface that is modern, majestic yet fun.
I turned Meechu's "M" into cat ears, in order to create a vibrant feeling for our college students. The ears also means "listen" --- listen to others' needs.
Mobile Iterations
Flow A: Onboarding
sign up/log in to app
enter .edu email
(to prevent fake accounts)
the first and last
letter of username
will display on profile pic
choose background
color for profile pic
choose 8 tags to
describe yourself
Flow B: Course Groups
the added classes are displayed on the main page
click on a course card and enter the course group chat
group chat info
Flow C: Matching Classmates
chat list
direct messages
classmate's profile page
classmate's tags
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Web Intro Page
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Testing
User Testing
we published an alpha test version of our app and sent invitations via Gmail to 30 users. Once these users accept the invitation and download the app on their phone, we assigned tasks to them and observed their behaviors via Zoom.
We received the following feedbacks:
1. Participants need more instructions on how to delete courses
2. Participants would like to hide some courses on their profile page
3. Images are unclickable in chat
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Reflections
User Testing is important
I never realized that the page when you click on an image also needs to be designed. Therefore, when designing this, I didn’t notice that this will cause our users unable to click on images. I feel the importance of user assessment once again because it really can help you find out problems in the early stage.
Communication is important when working in an interdisciplinary team
This is the first time that I work with software engineers to deliver a real product. From the experience I learned that effective communication saves tons of time.