Querencia
@Design Consulting at Cornell
Tools
Figma, Trello, Monday.com, Notion, G-Suite, Zoom,
My Role
Junior UX researcher, UI developer
Time Line
One semester: August-December 2021
Introduction
The transition from grade school to college life is difficult. Especially with how well-known and overwhelming Cornell may seem to be, my team and I decided to reflect on these challenges and come up with mockups of an app that would allow that assimilation to be smoother. Enter Querencia, the app to help you feel at home. It provides students with restaurants, places to visit and people to meet based on a survey they take.
My Role
During this semester, I was tasked with learning to ideate and develop prototypes with Figma as a junior designer. I mostly worked with interviewing users, and helping the team categorize information into actionable UX goals as well as summarizing our findings into personas. I also helped with deciding on branding and the UI style guides as well.
Problem
Students are trying to look for ways to connect with others, meet them and get to explore and do new things in order to enjoy their time at Cornell. They are looking for the best way to do that with the conglomerate advice, resource and conflicting preferences.
Action
Our team is looking to cultivate an app design that makes exploration fun with features that allow reflection, investigation and meeting new people simple and approachable.
Goals
-encourage users to get to find other users easily through shared interests
-promote the explorations of local businesses and nature areas and Cornell-exclusive activities
-pause and reflect on their Cornell journey
User Research and Sorting
After interviewing 10+ students, we found that similar reasons for feeling overwhelmed as a freshman was lack of personal connection, an imbalance between personal and school time as well as learning to navigate over-spontaneity and disarray with a monotonous routine. How would we help navigate these issues and make accommodating to student life at Cornell better?
Persona
This is Alice, a persona we created based on the three main wants our user listed above. My team and I filtered them based on different goals that we want our user to feel when using our app and features we would like to show on our app itself.
The challenging part of this persona is to not make her overly complicated and too idealistic. To combat this, we also incorporated struggles and interests our real students had-like hiking or a food hobby to make Alice a realistic user to remind us of our target audience.
Prototype I
Through our persona and user research, we decided on curating a low fidelity prototype using three UX goals:
-provide a place for variety in a monotonous routine
-make finding people with common interests memorable
-organize events, work and meetings with others
How did we decide to convert goals to designs?
-provide a place for variety in a monotonous routine: add a wheel of chance feature to finding events and people/using different daily quizzes to match people
-make finding people with common interests memorable: adding a journaling system and a photo collection method to show highlights
-organize events, work and meetings with others: implement: provide a calendar with different organization skills like a chart or graph view
Bump in the Road I
We were stuck on how to make a system that implored users to continuously use our app. We didn’t want to make a full-blown game system but we also wanted to steer clear from minigames that were too repetitive or unclear. We came up with a couple ideas, from a spinning wheel to a questionnaire/survey of the day.
We chose our solution by listing assumptions rather than realistic interactions within the app. For example, we sacrificed a row-structured schedule planner in lieu of a calendar style because there was more opportunity to fit in our other features like the journaling system to be organized within the calendar, and people were more used to this standard.
We also worked with redesigning some of our features to be less repetitive. There are only so many locations in Ithaca, and the “based on __ that you liked,” there might not be enough locations or resources to rotate as well as it feeling like another method of the spinning wheel of events. Instead, we decided we would compress it all into the wheel, spinning it again if you’ve tried it before, so we completely omitted a feature we thought would be helpful before.
Revisiting Prototype I
These are more finished products of our work, with the calendar view published as per feedback. We also digitally prototyped the spinning wheel feature, where we combined the low prototype idea of having both this feature and the “based on what you like, try these venues” recommendation feature. This made it easier for programming and implementation later down the line.
We also organized the rating system that we decided would be a good feature. We thought that students trying new places would rely on reviews and the credibility of those reviews even if the spinner landed somewhere that seemed interesting.
This is a mini user flow of finding an event and writing a review on a library/location. A student would find a location recommendation on the home page, sift through the options, see reviews and rating of the location and then be able to provide their own after they visited the area themselves. This provides a place for students who hope to visit that area a place to see if it might be right for them, and also notify other students of their perspective.
Indirectly, this gives an accountability system for reviewer and reviewee and the Cornell community in general to provide honest and open reviews because it is driven for students, by students.
Improvements for Next Time
If there was more time for a more extensive case study, I would have liked to have more time to flesh out and re-iterate some features in the design, especially the navigation and the way you could meet other users. I feel like that feature in particular has room to improve since people like to approach friend-making in different ways. Branching off of the bump that we saw in our design journey, I feel like I could make the app be more realistic and standard in terms of finding people to friend and explore Cornell together with more users to test. I also would have liked to test more freshmen in particular and then compare those findings with seniors to understand what people wish they would have done as a freshmen to prepare them best for the year ahead.
Personal Reflection
I’ve always wanted to create an app usable for Cornell students, and making one befitting my own personal struggle-assimilating into a new community- is one I was glad to be able to execute through the design process. Design Consulting at Cornell was my first exposure to design at all. I was very grateful to learn more about the design community first through this organization. It allowed me to blend my interests in drawing and writing as well as the growing world of technology and I was able to improve more on my communication skills, presentation work and collaborating in a team.
Professional Takeaways
This was my first encounter with design, and I was able to learn about how to create personas, write UX goals, and learn how to prototype in Figma. Through the help of mentorship and the PMs at DCC, I was able to expedite my design education greatly and learn more about both the importance of visual design and proper etiquette in conducting ux interviews for satisfactory user experience as a whole.