Find a Buddy

Grace Song
Nov 2 · 7 min read

Course: INFO 3450 HCI

My Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer

Design Tools Used: Balsamiq, Sketch, Invision

Team Members: Grace Song, Cordelia Jin, Natalie Fung, Rebecca North, Ryan Curtis


Design Problem

College is stressful enough with homework, tests, clubs and so much more. The last thing students want to worry about is their social life. Finding friends is the first task students complete upon starting at a new university. Once students find their place, they do not typically try and branch out to completely new people. This makes it extremely difficult for students who transferred or do not have a defined group or even those who just want to make new friends. This creates a segregated social environment on college campuses. Everyone around each other on college campuses is in similar situations. They inspire collaboration and group bonding. However, defined groups of friends do not allow for this environment to occur.

The concept of the design is connecting college students who want to make new friends with one another. Our goal was to determine the obstacles preventing students from meeting other new students and to analyze social interactions. We would then include these obstacles and other observations from our interview into a mobile application.

User Research

The participants that were interviewed were students in their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year at Cornell. These students were from different backgrounds, demographics, and academic majors to ensure we did not have a homogeneous sample. We were able to recruit five participants by advertising via social media. The interviews were specifically conducted in social settings amongst campus — some of the offered locations on the Google Form were Duffield, Mac’s Café, Libe Café. These locations were imperative to our data collection. Aside from just collecting answers from our participants, we also were hoping to take notice of their interactions to the busy, social environments around them. Conversation in a quiet setting is different from an overly social one.

Our primary data collection technique for the interview was note-taking. One team member would ask the question and the other member would take notes of the responses and the participant’s expression and movements.

The questions we asked varied and participants were to identify the question types differently based on what they believe is either identifying, confidential, or sensitive information. The questions that we asked were about the users’ social interactions on a college campus. Therefore, we obtained information about how the participants interact with different people and how comfortable they are in new settings. We were aware that asking how comfortable they are about meeting new people was potentially a sensitive question.

One of our goals was to make the participants comfortable during the interview and to protect their privacy. To make sure of this, we had each participant sign a consent form. Additionally, all documented notes and recordings will be disposed of after we complete the final documentation for the project.

Design Process

Our design process began with a brainstorming session to identify problems that can be addressed to help “weave the social fabric”. We began by individually brainstorming several ideas to improve the community, largely focused on the student community of Cornell University. We then pitched ideas to each other and decided to address the perceived problem that many students had a hard time meeting new people after their first year because of the changing social environment. We had an early idea of a solution where students could use a mobile app to find random people to eat a meal with and receive half off for doing so, inspired by the app Pocket Points.

After this, we conducted contextual user interviews with a variety of people in our target audience, upperclassmen at Cornell. Each interview followed the same protocol for consistency and focused on understanding the social habits and experiences of our user group to identify their needs. Following the interviews, we analyzed the data by creating activity notes from our findings and then creating an affinity diagram of the notes. The affinity diagram produced a set of common behaviors, goals, and needs from across the different interviews that we used to construct a persona that was a fictional user that we could specifically design for. This helped us to create a set of requirements important to the user group that should be included in the designed solution.

Affinity Diagrams

We then conducted market research to understand existing solutions that could be used to address our problem and analyze. Each team member then individually brainstormed 20 ideas for a solution to pitch to the group. During the group brainstorming session, we found many similarities across ideas with key features to address different requirements. We then combined some of the best ideas into our designed solution, Find a Buddy. In developing the design, we created a set of UI sketches to represent the app’s main features and storyboards to highlight the features and tasks the app can be used for. Using this preliminary design, we created a low-fidelity paper prototype.

Paper Prototype

We then got early feedback on our design through a series of user interviews where the users were asked to complete a set of tasks using the paper prototype that represent the functionality of the app. Following these interviews, we used the feedback to make a few modifications to our design and create a mid-fidelity prototype in Balsamiq.

Balsamiq Prototype

We then evaluated this prototype with a set of heuristic evaluations using Nielsen’s set of Heuristics and in a group evaluation session decided on the set of problems to fix and proposed solutions for those problems. We made these changes when creating a high-fidelity prototype using Sketch and InVision.

Sketch/Invision Prototype

Once we had a high-fidelity prototype, we conducted several usability testing interviews with users to evaluate our design solution for the tasks we defined. This along with a poster presentation gave us more feedback to iterate on our design a final time now that more functionality is implemented.

Through this process, we discovered some key insights that significantly shaped our design solution. One of these was that many students are not necessarily averse to meeting new people but do not usually initiate conversation with strangers as they are unsure whether the other person is also open to meeting or talking to someone new. This became apparent from our user interviews at the beginning of the design process, when we asked our interviewees about their social lives at Cornell. During the solution space and idea generation stage of our design process, we heavily considered this insight as it was key to understanding users’ motivations and thought processes. Our design solution presents a way for users to meet others who they know will also be open to meeting them, as they would not be using the app if they were not.

During our usability tests and poster session, concerns about the real life impacts including anonymity and accountability arose multiple times. This was a key insight because it revealed fundamental problems regarding users’ desire to use the app and level of comfort engaging in the app’s activities. This shaped our design in that we completely removed the option to be anonymous or not so that all users will remain anonymous. We also added a feature which gives each user a unique QR code that hosts of events can scan to confirm attendance without taking down personal information. These modifications are intended to create a platform where users are equal in transparency and were made in the final iteration of our inVision prototype.

Some other design decisions we made include a complete redesign of the Food section of our app, based on data we collected during our usability tests that showed that many people did not understand how to join Food events. Our redesign also improves the UI of the app as a whole by making the layout of the Food section consistent with that of the Events and Chats sections. We changed the text labels of the sections in the menu to be icons, which improved visual appearance and removed misleading text information. This was based on feedback that our app was too text-heavy as well as information from our usability tests that indicated confusion distinguishing between Activities and Food.

Grace Song

Written by

Cornell ’19 | Cornell Computing and Information Science ‘20

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