Plusme
Problem
Have you ever encountered problems with your day-to-day school business, such as class selection, forming study groups in an unfamiliar department, or being overwhelmed with their tests and homeworks and sometimes forgetting some of them?
Actually, all the information could be found somewhere on school’s websites. However, the information come sporadically from the different websites, making it difficult to obtain them at same time.
Solution
PLUSME integrates several features regarding students’ day-to-day business. With the app, students can see their upcoming events, such as assignment deadlines or approaching tests. Moreover, they can explore their peers’ summaries and experiences in specific classes, and make comparisons against similar classes. In addition, they can chat with others in the same class through the app, and form groups if needed.
Role
This project is based on a smart school website, NCTU Plus, for which I served as designer and front-end developer. I worked as a UX designer in this project. I focused on improving the real time experience on mobile device and redesigned the interfaces.
Method & Tool
Method: Competitive analysis, Persona, Agile, Wireframing, Prototyping, User testing
Tool: Sketch, Prott, Illustrator, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, Vue.js, Chart.js
Design Process
Research
I interviewed 10 students from 4 departments and list all of their problems regarding their day-to-day school business, including course selection, in-class experience and experiences on E3 platform which is a website can allow students submit assignments and get classes’ resources.
Findings & Facts
Personas
After interviews, I categorized them into 2 segments and then created 2 type of persona: Introvert and Extrovert. The persona help me to think from users perspective and be more empathetic.
Storyboard
Then I created storyboads to define the scenarios and problems more clear. There are three problems that I want to solve.
Design
UI Flow
After defining the problems, I created an UI flow to organize information architecture.
Wireframes
Then I create wireframe to make all information in the app more clear and understandable.
Evaluate Functions and Flow
After I finished wireframes, I use POP to transform the wireframes into a real working prototype. I selected 3 tasks and 2 users to be tested in order to identify usability problems, during which the user is probed to explain their expectations and problems. Following that, I found that the chat room's interface was a little confusing so I simplified the interface after considerable evaluation.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Evaluation
Usability Tests
I assess learnability, satisfaction, and effectiveness of PLUSME by making up 3 task-scenarios and asking 6 subjects to accomplish the tasks. I kept records of the problems they encountered while using the app and measured the time they spent on each tasks.
Results
From the evaluation, I discovered that most of the users can easily find out the upcomming events and course's summaries. However, since the members' list is at third level, one user spent double time on searching for the members' list.
Moreover, one interviewee indicated that she had concern with the feature of sending message to others since she is afriad that students may be harassed by strangers. To solve the problem, I will allow users to change their privacy setting in their profile page.
Concept Video
I made a Lego animation to demonstrate scenarios and introduce the concept of PLUSME. To elaborate its features, I created 4 sub-stories.
