Summary

CLIENT

Humber College

TOOLS

Figma

Miro

Zeplin

Working as a Product Designer, I led the design and implementation of Mixem at Humber College. The engagement included strategic planning, research, wireframing all the way to handing off high fidelity prototypes.

Mixem is a mobile app for students as well as an analytics dashboard for event organizers. The goal of the app is to give students a single source for events and support at the college, to reduce their degrees of separation and speed up the process of finding a community. I have chosen to present this specific flow in this case study as it resonates well with the research done below. 

Problem

In a growing metropolis like Toronto, classes get bigger each year leaving students to struggle when making friends and ultimately finding a community that they fit into. With COVID-19 in the picture, educational institutions expect an even higher degree of separation among students.

Solution

Providing students the flexibility to create events online, without any external noise or addictive features of present-day social applications, in order to help them meet like-minded people at their school and hence build a community that most new students lack.

STRATEGY

Stakeholder Discovery Workshop

In order to develop a long-term vision for an organization, it was crucial for us (designer and stakeholders) to articulate a brand that acts as a guiding principle throughout the product’s journey. I set up a virtual stakeholder interview workshop with the Ignite team responsible for student life at Humber College and using Miro, I was able to not only shape the goals of the project, but remotely ensure all parties involved were on the same page about the success of Mixem.

Key findings: 

• Students need support and encouragement to socialize
• Need a single source to find events at their institution 
• Help students find like-minded friends in a new environment
• Encourage students to get off their devices 

RESEARCH

Student Interviews

Existing research done at Simon Fraser University validated some of the assumptions made by the stakeholders and provided some great insights.  However, further research was conducted to develop an accurate portrayal of students at Humber university. Through virtual user interviews with a focus group, we learned about how students make friends and unearthed key pain-points they faced during their first year and validate our findings from the Stakeholder interviews.

Key findings:

• There are way too many events on social media
• Universities try their best, but orientation is too chaotic
• First-year my grades suffered because of no support system
• Hard to start a new club and reach the right people at school

Persona

When conducting the interviews we realized that by focusing on introverts, we would also cater to the extroverts in the school and hence decided to focus on the former group.

This persona has been developed through clear trends that we were seeing in the feedback from the students interviewed above. In fact, some of the interests were directly taken from participants in the group i.e punch needling. 

Student Experience Map

Here the main opportunity lies in reducing the degrees of separation between students.

The reason why I chose an Experience map is because I wanted stakeholders to visualize a student's entire end-to-end experience when trying to accomplish the goal of finding    a community. It’s used for understanding general student behavior and as earlier noted in secondary research is applicable to all educational institutions.

Design Question

Between research insights and experience journey findings, I was able to get a clear understanding of the problem at hand. The problem was substantial, yet straightforward. 

How might we help reduce the degrees of separation between students?

User Flow

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Low fidelity screens helped to identify and prioritize MVP features with our dev team and create a timeline for the workable prototype.

Design System

High Fidelity Mock Ups

Next Steps

Next steps would involve incorporating the resource "From Surviving to Thriving: Developing Personal and Academic Resilience" by McGill University into the app. It is currently available online for free, however the goal is to turn the content into an app that makes it easy for students to absorb all the information in it. This incredible resource can help build resilience and minimize the negative impact of stressful situations so that, rather than just surviving their post-secondary experience, students can thrive in their new environments.