VioletHub — Case Study

VioletHub is a platform created as a solution to improve the overall college experience for students. From features that allow students to connect with others to features that help students with their academic achievements, VioletHub is an all-in-one app designed by NYU students, for NYU students.

Created by Sofia Lin, Shourya Jasti, Tom McCluskey, Irene Park

Brainstorming Ideas & Defining the Problem

The first step to creating a service design pitch was to figure out what issue that we wanted to centralize our focus on. To do that, we each came up with ideas individually and later formed to discuss as a group. Some answers that we came up with were:

Brainstorming Ideas

After discussing as team, we were able to decide on the topic of social connections. Then, moved on to mind mapping exercises based on the issue, and landed on the final question of:

How might we improve social connections in the technological age of Covid-19?

Here, we brainstormed even more.

Example of a thread that we each brainstormed on via Zoom

We landed on two solutions. We could either come up with a way to foster social connections/community building, or we could construct an app that builds social skills and provides tips to improve speaking.

Again, we went into another discussion to hone down our idea into one topic. We chose to stick with the first idea: how can we foster social connections and build communities?

Then came an idea that all four of us were familiar with. As we were all NYU students, we were aware of the issue that NYU students struggle with loneliness and inclusion on campus. So we had found the idea we wanted to tackle, and came up with the final HMW statement of:

How might we improve the college experience for students to feel less lonely/more included on campus?

Research

Now that we had our idea, we then moved on to do more research on this topic. To do that, we asked 12 students at NYU the question of “How would you describe the community at NYU?”

“Rich elitist kids.”

“Zoom community”

“Disconnected, sometimes lonely.”

“Many micro communities”

These were some of answers that we had pooled after our interviews. The responses gathered proved our HMW statement. From there, we went into even further research that was supported by some of the articles that we had found from our research with improving social connections in the technological age of Covid-19. We knew that apps such as Strava and VRchat were successful when it came to having people interact. So, we decided on creating an app that brought NYU students together.

User Personas and More Findings

Next, we decided to create a user persona to further understand the user’s perspectives if we were to design and launch this app. Through this we came up with the profile of Jessica Green.

User Persona Profile: Jessica Green

While coming with Jessica’s profile, we talked through some of our potential pain points as NYU students, and discovered another finding. We realized that we as NYU students were struggling with issues that related to academics. For example, there were too many external sites and apps that NYU students had to rely on to get through their college career: NYU Engage, Albert, BrightSpace, NYU Campus Maps, Safe NYU, Mobile NYU, and so many more. Other issues included not having a way to communicate with peers outside of the classroom, and not having a site where they could rate classes and professors within the NYU community.

Our finalized pain points for Jessica included:

• No campus or sense of community.
• Hard to meet people and make new friends.
• There’s many different websites & it’s hard to keep track of them all at once.
• Wants to attend more school events, but doesn’t know when/where they are.
• Hard to communicate with peers outside of class.
• Wants to take new classes but needs recommendations.
• Wants to see a professor rating, but can’t find the reviews for NYU professors.

With these new findings, we came to the final conclusion that we wanted to come up with an all-in-one app for NYU students to improve their overall college experience.

Ideation and Stakeholder Mapping

Then came our ideation stage. In this stage, we discussed different features that we had wanted on the app. Being NYU students ourselves, it was fairly easy for us to come up with the features we wanted to include because we drove them from apps that we use ourselves.

We focused on three questions:

• What are some things that we struggle with as NYU students?
• What are some applications that students use to socialize?
• What are some applications that we rely on as NYU students?

Apps and extensions such as Snapchat, Find My, Rate My Professor, Reddit, and GamePigeon were mentioned. We pulled features from each app that led us to the final features of our app below:

Final features

A stakeholder map was also created for NYU students. Creating this, we balanced out two topics: level of influence and level of interest. This helped us narrow the direction we were taking when focusing on what stakeholders we wanted to focus on.

Prototyping

We finally moved on to develop the prototype for our product using Figma. To lay out a more thorough design for our app, a design system was created to keep everyone aligned when creating their own sections of the application.

Our design system

With this design system, we moved on to creating our Low-Fi Prototype. We made a sitemap to keep our pages organized and fluid.

Sitemap

Low-Fi prototype

Our low-fi prototype consisted of rough slides of the different features that we wanted to include. We each designed a section of the app that we thought would fit best.

The name of the app was to be determined. We left that last, and had many options for us to choose from. Our first choice was NYU Friends, but we ultimately decided to go with VioletHub.

User Testings and Findings

We then tested our users based on the questions below:

User testing script

This user testing script allowed us to allocate all of the answers that were given to us. Through this we were able to get the feedback on our first prototype:

1. Users found that the game center didn’t fit well into the app. They were confused on how it integrated with the rest of the features of the app.
2. Private chats, public chats, and discussion boards were very similar in features, although each features were completely different.
3. The tutorial that we had created for users actually turned out to be more confusing for them.
4. RSVP functions, seeing events on the campus map, and being able to see which of their friends were attending events on campus were suggested.
5. Being shown the user profile immediately logging on was confusing as they expected to see the home screen first.

Final Prototype

With the feedback in mind, we were then able to edit the prototype into its final version. We also created a final logo for our app!

Here are the changes we made to the final prototype that can be accessed HERE, but below are the listed changes that we had made to the final prototype.

1. We added a notification that users would be getting a tutorial before they entered the app. That way, it would reduce the confusion from the second they open the app.
2. We split the chats into two different features: Discussion Board and Private Chat.
3. We added a way for students to see events on the campus map. Users were now able to see how many attendees were going to the event, and how many of their friends were going as well. They were also given the option to RSVP.
4. The biggest change to our app was removing our game feature. We completely got rid of it as users said it didn’t integrate with the rest of the features on the app.

Final Thoughts & Next Steps

Thinking about the next steps in our app, we would love to have the options to:

1. Develop the app into an actual app available to everyone in the app store.
2. Reach out to NYU, pitching our app so that it can be incorporated as part of the official apps for NYU. This will not only gather more attention, but it will overall gather more users and reliability now that it is recognized as an official NYU application.
3. Make constant improvements based on user feedback. As the app develops and more users download the application, we would have to develop the app in the direction that students want it to go in. After all, it is an app that is designed for the students.

How will our app be sustainable, and how will we incorporate the diversity of voices?

There are always going to be students at NYU, meaning that there will always be a crowd for this application. Through constant changes to the application as well, it will keep it updated to the newest feedback and made readily accommodated towards students.

For diversity, the app will strive to make sure that no users are targeted. That includes some of our ideas to:

1. Use AI to target slurs and harmful phrases to have it removed from the platform immediately.
2. Have an app administrator to oversee the app.
3. Report icon for users to report when they see harmful content.

Overall, I had learned a lot from this process. Going into the process and overseeing this from start to finish was so gratifying in the end when we finally created the prototype for the class. I learned so much about communicating with others, and realized just how important it is when it comes to working in a group. Everyone, and every part of this project played such an influential role in developing VioletHub. I am so grateful to have been part of such an amazing team, and proud that we had created an app like VioletHub during the short period of time that we were given.

Class Presentation and Feedback

We presented VioletHub to the class, and we received feedback from the presentation. Here are some of the feedback that we received below:

1. Profile was helpful
2. Add dorm reviews
3. Prototype was detailed

Some questions that were asked included:

1. How did we choose the features?
2. Why would we want to have this associated with NYU?
3. Which stakeholder was the most influential?
4. How would people get used to this app?
5. Why was the location included for users?