Aggie Event Planner
A mobile application for students to discover and learn about campus events.
I worked on designing a mobile application that allows students to find clubs and activities on campus. Aggie Event Planner provides students with the means to discover RSO’s, reserve tickets and meet other students. I conducted user interviews, sketched wireframes, synthesized findings, prototyped user flows and established a marketing plan to spread word of the application.
For my prototyping design course, I was prompted to create a service based application for UC Davis students. When ideating what I wanted to focus on, I considered the purpose of the particular service, the demand for it and the ability of UC Davis to feasibly deliver this product. I considered aspects of the college experience that were especially lacking during COVID and pondered the lack of community. I chose a mobile app format after considering the convenience that comes from engaging with others at any given chance on your phone.
A lack of centralized information on UC Davis' school events hinders students from finding ways to be more involved on campus. Additionally, during this project, COVID was rapidly spreading and many of my peers expressed how they took recluse, but missed being able to safely communicate and congregate with others.
The current university event platform, Aggie Life is rarely used, not kept up to date, and does not encourage students to get actively involved.
To learn more about current issues, I interviewed 5 students. I found that students don’t consider AggieLife a viable option for finding and interacting with clubs, and used Facebook and Instagram to find information on events. The search filters on the site were too broad and difficult to use. Additionally, students were overwhelmed by the amount of information shown about all 800+ clubs at UC Davis, including clubs that were not interesting to them.
After conducting user research, I synthesized my findings through affinity mapping where I identified pain points. My target audience consisted of students who are looking to get involved and find community on campus. My overarching research question was:
How might I foster a sense of connection, community, engagement, and excitement within an events application?
I created two more HMW research questions to guide my designs further:
How might I make it easier for students to find organizations that meet their needs?
How might I go about marketing this application to students?
I began ideating solutions for my HWM questions and pinpointed the various pages and tasks I wanted to create to attack these issues.
Interest Curation page: Students are prompted to create profiles upon downloading the app and selecting their interests/hobbies. Moreover, their feed will be carefully crafted to recommend the user events related to those filters.
Discover page: Contains a search bar for finding events, filters based on a variety of categories, dates, distance, price range, and attendance count. The home feed shows users popular upcoming events and recommended ones.
Listing events page: Users can post about campus events being hosted and must include a title, address, date and time, short description, price per ticket, and quantity of tickets available.
Saved events page: An array of segmented albums that contain all of the user's saved events, upcoming events, and past events. Users have the ability to create specific albums tailored to their interests.
Profile page: A public profile on the app containing centralized information regarding the user's number of events attended, events posted, the friends in their circle, and posted events.
E-ticket page: A digital space to access all upcoming and past e-tickets for events on the app. Tickets are scanned for entry to the event.
I sketched out ideas then translated more refined versions of my drawings into mid-fidelity wireframes. This was a means of establishing a base visual to solve the common pain points collected from my research.
One challenge I faced was the amount of time I was given to promote my application (1 week). To combat this, I came up with creative ways to market the app and encourage usability testing.
I began by creating advertisements with QR codes that took users directly to my app prototype. I posted these cards around populated areas on campus.
Cows are a central icon to UC Davis' culture. I designed and laser cut two wooden cow mascots with QR codes attached. These cows were located at the Cruess Hall Design building and Memorial Union Center. Alongside these cows were posters encouraging the student community to take photos and tag Aggie Event Planner on posts online.
I created an Instagram account @aggie_eventss for the app and posted several short infographics to provide users with a brief overview of the app's specs. To garner additional traction, I hosted a giveaway and handed out laser cut cow keychains to the first 10 people who followed the account and tested the app.
Embarking on these pursuits further enhanced my learning and challenged me to explore a greater range of creative endeavors. I was able to close the gap between digital and physical experiences, and my non-traditional approach allowed for differentiation in each prototype.
I also found that users consistently clicked on the “share to friends” feature and the “view friends attending" button. Users also stayed on pages 2x longer when it involved interacting with peers.
For my final prototype, I put emphasis on features with greater correlation to an event app so its purpose was evident.
I also adhered to UC Davis’ established design system to ensure consistency between my frames and incorporated the font family Proxima Nova.
View my summary video for the application!
Takeaways
From the copious amount of user tests I was able to garner within the given time period, I enjoyed hearing about students’ unique experiences and feedback. My aim was to simplify the event searching process and encourage users to come back for more which was a success. Users now have a convenient community to do so while gaining a sense of interconnectedness with their peers.
By embracing a community-based approach to product design—I was able to tackle the overall experience effectively. I created this project entirely from scratch and learned to practice creative freedom. I appreciate the opportunities to think outside the box and explore an array of concepts and campaigns. As a designer, I always make sure to keep things fun!
Next Steps
In the future, I would like to explore a desktop version of Aggie Event Planner, which would suit the busy, on-the-go lifestyle of a college student.
