A Recap on Creative Labs — Our First Design Program!
Interested in building your own portfolio, or trying to find some inspiration? This fall, Monica, our Projects Director, led four teams involving students of varying skill levels to collaborate on an 8 week project to redesign an app. Students learned to conduct user research, create mood boards and brainstorm ideas, create low and high fidelity wireframes, and ultimately prototype their solutions on Figma!
If any of this seems like something you’d want to do, consider applying for the Spring 2022 Creative Labs Cohort.
1. Venmo — Team HIMM
Why?
The team noticed that some of Venmo’s recent changes made it more difficult to navigate the app. Most notable problems included:
- Confusing icons in the navigation bar
- Sub-sections like cryptocurrency being incorrectly prioritized in the main navigation bar
- Difficult to find pending payment requests sent to users/vice versa
- Search bar not visible at all times
How?
- Redesign the navigation bar
- Make icons clearer and abide by industry standards
- Add a hamburger menu to store features
- Add a “pending requests” tab
- Make balance and search bar easily visible
2. Discord — Team Concept Squad
Why?
Discord was originally a gaming-oriented platform that has now expanded to many non-gaming communities, especially over the pandemic. This huge influx of new, non-gamer users who may not be as technologically literate, however, creates confusions with:
- Creating server-specific profiles and nicknames
- Voice channels
- Interacting with an intimidating interface
How?
- Redesign the profile card by indicating what nickname is used in which server
- Remove option to mute/deafen when not in a voice channel
- Create a toggleable “join” button to avoid accidental joins into voice channels
- Provide short onboarding process for users to understand server/channel hierarchy
3. Zoom — Team TheZoomZooms
Why?
As many students may be aware, the current Zoom mobile app can be very frustrating and inconvenient. Despite how many people have begun to utilize Zoom on a day to day basis, the mobile app has limitations involving:
- Difficulty telling how to change modes
- Reaching the chat button — too many steps involved
- Inaccessible raise hand feature
- No option to set a default viewing mode (automatically resets to speaker mode)
How?
- Utilize vertical swiping feature to access chat
- Create a drop down menu for settings and details, where users can change their view mode
- Only including the most used icons in the navigation bar
- Include reactions in chat
4. RUParking
Why?
Although Rutgers has multiple apps to help with transportation (Transloc, RUMobile, etc.) as well as a website, none of these have resources specifically for parking. Parking information is often scattered all over the Rutgers website, making it difficult for students to find the information they are looking for. There are also just common problems with parking in general like:
- Finding parking lot hours and locations
- Locating spots
- Having an efficient way to measure out the distance to the parking lot
How?
- Utilize parking feature to RUMobile
- Searchable feature for parking on each campus, showing availability of lots
- Built in “Apple Maps” feature
- Filter by type of permit, campus, and time to reach destination
Overview
What do you think? Which redesign did you like best? I personally love the RUParking design and hope to see some version of it instituted in the app one day. It feels really intuitive and I’m sure that many students would find it helpful as well.
If you’re interested in participating in something similar, make sure to stay tuned for announcements next semester! We hope everyone who joined Creative Labs had a great experience and can use what they learned not only for their portfolio but onwards in their UX journey. Thanks for reading and enjoy the holidays — Happy New Year!
— The Creative X Content Committee :)
