Building Community & Connecting NYU Students
Project Overview
VioletHub is a social platform where students can connect with each other and access New York University (NYU) related resources, facilities, and events. Currently, NYU has no service to help students to connect with each other, leaving people to go to other sources such as Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook groups
My Role
As a team, we performed user research, competitive analysis, created user flow, wireframes and prototypes in a 6-week design sprint.
Team: Sofia Lin, Irene Park, Shourya Jasti, Tom McCluskey
Date: November 2023 — December 2023
Tools: Figma, Trello, Mural, Pitch, Illustrator, Google Drive, Google Meet
Defining the Problem
When brainstorming as a team, I conducted mind mapping exercises to help us think of different topics we could do our project on. We explored different topics from helping students register for their classes easier, finding professor ratings reliably, to making students aware of NYU MakerSpace resources that are generally unknown. As COVID-19 drastically changed the social fabric of the world, I suggested we mind map starting with the topic of social connection.
From this mind mapping exercise, we came up with the question of How might we improving social connection in the technological age during COVID-19?
We were stuck in-between 2 different themes:
- Fostering social connections/community building
- Building social skills & speaking tips
To decide between these 2 topics, we opted in for dot voting to see which solution we all preferred.
The first option won the voting process with a score of 3–1, so we decided to dive deeper into the concept of fostering social connections and community building.
From our exercises defining the problem, we knew we wanted to focus on fostering social connections and community building, however we weren’t sure what target audience to focus on, and what community to help build. As NYU students, when discussing we realized that this problem is prevalent in our campus, therefore we decided to focus on college students. Since coming to NYU, many of us have felt lonely and alone, exemplified by COVID-19 causing a rise in people struggling with mental health. As NYU currently has no service to aid these problems, we hoped to address this question:
How might we improve the college experience for students to feel less lonely/more included on campus?
Preliminary Research
Going into our research study, our hypothesis was that most NYU students felt lonely.
We asked 12 people the question “How would you describe the community at NYU?”.
“Disconnected, sometimes lonely, sometimes elitist”
“What community?”
“Many micro communities. Everyone does their own thing within those communities. Can feel lonely if you don’t find your niche”
“Zoom”
There is currently no sense of community at NYU, leading many students with feelings of loneliness. This validated our hypothesis and affirmed that we were moving in the right direction.
Analogous Research
NYU’s campus is in the heart of New York City, the United States’s most populous city. As opposed to other colleges such as University of Virginia, University of California Los Angeles, and University of Florida, New York University (NYU) doesn’t have a secluded college campus.
With a college “campus” in the heart of Washington Square Park, students of NYU are mixed in with people living in NYC as Washington Square Park is a public park. This makes it more difficult for NYU students to connect with each other, and is part of the reason why NYU lacks community.
“When I first came to New York City, I knew nobody. There was nowhere for me to meet other people besides in person events, which were hard to find”
Maxine Maciezko 23, former NYU Student
Stakeholder Mapping
We then decided to look into creating a Stakeholder map to understand the level of involvement and interaction different people have. We did this by grouping stakeholders at by direct relationship and indirect relationship with the user. Through this, we mapped the stakeholders that the user will be in direct contact with, however we realized that this doesn’t necessarily equate to the level of influence that the stakeholders have over the user.
From this, we wanted to get a better understanding of people interested in the project, and people holding the most power. The people who hold a high level of influence could modify project requirements, and the people with a high level of interest are affected by the project outcome. Doing this helped us navigate what group of people we should focus on when building our app, and who to reach out to after prototyping to help move this prototype into production.
Cross-App Analysis
When looking at NYU’s preexisting apps, we’ve realized that NYU has 18 different official apps. Many of these apps are dedicated towards specific things for example: NYU Federal Credit Union, NYU Bus, NYU Guided Tour. As most of these apps don’t have that many reviews, we estimate that these apps don’t gain much traction among students.
From researching NYU’s apps, we found that there is a need for an all-in-one NYU affiliated app to improve and simplify the college experience. This need was further expressed by the student above when they wrote a review on the app NYU Mobile stating how the app would be of greater use if more NYU tools were implemented.
Inspiration
Once we finalized that we were going to create an all-in-one app, we asked ourselves 3 questions:
- What are some applications that students use to socialize?
- What are some applications that we rely on as NYU students?
- What are some things that we struggle with as NYU students?
We looked at socialization apps we frequently use as well as specific tools we rely on as NYU students. We used these as sources of inspiration for creating our app, VioletHub.
Many iOS users are familiar with Game Pigeon. With Game Pigeon, you are able to play games with your friends via text message. From our analogous research, we found that messaging technologies are important tools for maintaining peer connectedness, so we decided to implement a games feature to our app.
We turned to Discord and Reddit for sources of inspiration regarding Private Chats and Discussion Boards. We believe these apps to be the most popular among teenagers and good for social connectedness.
We were inspired by Snapchat for their live location map. We believed this would be helpful for finding on campus events, and help connect friends by proximity to each other.
We found that we all use Rate My Professor to find out course and professor reviews, as we want to pick the best possible class we can. We figured by incorporating this into VioletHub, it will help build the NYU community and it will attract all NYU students to the app.
Site Map
After mapping our stakeholders and looking at inspiration, we decided to move into the prototyping phase through creating a site map. This helped us visualize each interaction the user has to go through to navigate the app. Additionally, creating a site map helped us clarify what our goals were when creating VioletHub: Campus Map, Weekly Events, Private Chat, Course Reviews, and Game Center.
Design System
We kept with the existing typography that the NYU used across its brand identity and changed a few features to make it mobile friendly. We kept the smallest font size 17px by Apple’s Human Interface Typography Guidelines to be readable on Android and iOS devices (android devices have a minimum of 16pt).
Regarding the color palette, we were heavily inspired by original color palette NYU currently uses. According to NYU, Violet is a nonconformist color that pushes boundaries to leave their mark on the world, and Ultra Violet should be used thoughtfully and sparingly to add impact and to emphasize important information. Following NYU’s advice, we decided to use Violet as our main color, and Ultra Violet as our accent color, with a variation of greys, whites, and black for smaller assets.
When choosing the iconography, we wanted to ensure that each icon was intuitive for users to understand. Because of this we chose icons carefully and attempted to find icons that matched each icon description.
Lastly, we compiled groups of components we would use throughout our design. Doing this made prototyping much easier and ensured when we were designing that we would remain visually consistent throughout.
We came up with a design system to add consistency, structure and to help communication across all team members.
Design Iterations
This section highlights the design iterations I was primarily responsible for during this project.
We first begun by creating a low-fi prototype of our app, and I focused primarily on the Introduction, Login, and Profile/Edit Profile pages.
After creating a Low-fi prototype, we began implementing changes from our design system. In doing so, we decided to add illustrations to add character and joy to the app — as our goal is to help students feel less lonely and more connected with each other.
User Feedback
Following our second version prototype of our app, we decided to conduct user feedback.
Doing so, we went to Bobst Library as it is a monument of NYU. We setup a table asking people to user test our app to help students feel less lonely and more included on campus. From this we got 7 participants and came up with a list of changes, the main ones being:
- Get rid of games or add games as a chat feature instead of a page on it’s own
- Wanted to see activities/events on the campus map
- Add feature that allows you to see which events friends are going to
- Add “tutorial” after first screen
- Split chat — class discussion and private are two features
- Add a signifier to the home screen for a new notification
Most people didn’t like the games feature, and said that they wanted it removed completely or implemented differently. Additionally, users were confused if they would be playing the games by themselves, friends, or random people on the app.
Additionally, users were confused in the tutorial for VioletHub. Users thought that hitting next would mean that they get to enter the app, but instead they were met with an introduction. While some users were in the introduction they got confused and thought they were in the app. This led us to create another introduction frame, explaining to the user that as it was their first time joining the app, they would have an optional introduction to explain the key features of the app.
In the end, we created a hi-fi prototype and implemented feedback we got from user testing.
Through user testing, the biggest hurdle we encountered during this project was understanding which features were liked and disliked by NYU Students, as well as what features we should add. When designing an all-in-one app, it’s important to take into consideration to only implement the most important features that users want. Additionally, we found that it was difficult to implement games into the app that users understood and enjoyed, so we ended up scrapping the idea completely.
Pitch Feedback & Next Steps
From pitching our designs, we gathered feedback on the profile, NYU association, marketing, and features.
We got feedback that users enjoyed the profile page, and that they would want it to be kept in the app. Users enjoyed having the option to link their Instagram and other social media platforms in their bio.
One person commented that when they lived in the NYU dorm, that they would’ve liked to see a page that ranked the dorms with reviews from real NYU students. They suggested we add a feature to the app that shows a list of the NYU dorms and that we gave the option for users to review the dorms they stayed in. We found this feature interesting and would be interested in seeing if other NYU students would be interested in the feature.
One student asked us if we would prefer to be associated with NYU or not. For small scale production our team would prefer to be associated with NYU as we can develop and gain user feedback more easier. According to our Stakeholder Map, NYU Admins have lots of leverage in our app, so we would want to work with them on development.
During this feedback session our professor Kathleen Chao asked our group the question:
Which stakeholder do you think would be the most influential — who should you reach out to next?
Looking at our Stakeholder Map, this is the section of stakeholders with the most influence and interest in our app.
Out of all of these stakeholders, I would argue that NYU students would be the most influential — as they will be our main people using the app. Without NYU students using our app it becomes meaningless, as VioletHub is aimed to help students.
Of all the stakeholders, we would reach out to NYU Administration to pitch our idea. As NYU Administration is responsible for all things affiliated with NYU, we figured this would be our next step.
Of NYU Administration, we found that the department most relevant to our service would be the Center for Student Life, and we decided to reach out to the Executive Director about pitching our idea. We have yet to hear back, however it would be an amazing opportunity if we would be granted the opportunity to pitch VioletHub.
