Students make Glasgow

My Role

Research and design from concept to completion

Tools

The Problem

Glasgow is a vibrant metropolis, and the home to three Scottish Universities; Glasgow University,Strathclyde University and Glasgow Caledonian University. 

Therefore, about 50,000 students come into the city every year to study. Many of those students come from across Scotland, the UK and indeed, the world, and could therefore be in a strange place with little or no knowledge of what Glasgow offers in the way of entertainment, clubs, bars, restaurants, sporting activities or places where students go to socialise.

The Challenge

The challenge was to research, design and build an engaging conceptual mobile application for the Glasgow city council that will inform new students of what Glasgow has to offer with consideration of current activities, products and services that are popular with a user demographic of 18–24-year-olds and identify a potential Student Guide design concept that will convey a positive experience of Glasgow to new students moving to the city. 

Understanding the project

The Client

The Glasgow city council is the local government authority for the city of Glasgow and provides services to all residents, as well as those who study, work, visit and do business in the city on a daily basis. They aim to provide equality for all in Glasgow and  improve the city together with it’s residents. 

Target Demography

Several students in a majority demographic of 18-24 year-olds come from across Scotland, the UK and the world to Glasgow which is an unfamiliar place to them. They do not have the knowledge of what Glasgow offers such as entertainment, clubs, bars, restaurants, sporting activities or places where students go to socialise. They also face challenges adjusting to the culture, lifestyle and getting accustomed to the city. A free mobile application that allows students to find their way around the city, see all the exciting places students can have fun and socialise, get tips, manage time and finances all in a gratifying and motivating manner will help promote student life in glasgow and help these young adults face encountered challenges. 

Goals

How will this be achieved?

The goals will be attained by ensuring the application will be effective, easy to use, efficient, engaging to the user and error tolerant so that the users can have a great user experience.

Design Approach

The project was carried out using the Double Diamond design model with the four stages of discover, define, develop and deliver. I started out the project with the 'discover' stage and conducted research on the clients, competitors and the users. The insights from my research led me to the 'define' stage where I was able to to define the problem and the proposed solution after which I moved to the 'develop' stage to ideate and test out different ideas across different iterations. This eventually led to the 'deliver' stage to deliver a high-fidelity prototype. 

Discover

Understanding the demography

The target demography for this application was already stated as 18-24 years old students in the brief. To keep the users in front and centre throughhout the design process, I needed to properly understand this age group and how the application would be tailored to their specific needs. Through research from journals, articles and carrying out surveys, I was able to get more insights on this demography.

This set of people belong to a generation popularly called Gen Z. They were born in the age of techonology and are very familiar with digital devices.

Competitive analysis

I carried out research on 4 similar products to identify opportunities and threats.

Viator application

I love Glasgow

Glasgow live

What’s on Glasgow Website - Heuristic Markup

Researching on the demography and competitiors really helped to provide an insight on the project direction.

The Demography: The demographic research gave me insight on their their lifestyle, where they like going, what they like doing and their financial expectations. Factoring these insights when designing the application will truly prove useful to this demography.

The Competitors: From the competitive analysis, it can be seen that several applications in the market today aim to provide resources on restaurants, information, events, experiences and finance management. However, these are all single purpose applications which are downloaded and used separately. I believe that designing an application with usability factors and accessibility guidelines with these needed features and even more, all in one place will appeal greatly to the 18 - 24 years old students demography. 

Define

Empathy mapping and building user personas

After gathering insights from the demography research, I conducted interviews with 4 participants in the age range of 18-24. With data collected from the interviews and research insights, I created a general empathy map based on this information to understand the perspectives and mindset of the target audience of how they think, feel, and behave. It was also essential to build user personas that makes it easier to empathize with them so I can design better for their goals, needs and provide solution to their frustrations. 

User persona of Olivia Campbell

User persona of Andre Costa

User's Point of view / Problem statements

The users’ POV gave me insight into who they are and helped tell their story. This insight was necessary to identify the right problem to address and to make informed decisions when working to solve those problems. It also helped establish criteria for evaluating ideas.

Using "How might we" statements

From stating the users' POV and problem statements, I was able to draft 'How might we' statements to allow me reframe my insights into opportunity areas and innovate on user problems found during user research which was captured in the user personas. 

How might we enable students move around easily? 

How might we make make students enjoy using our app? 

How might we help users find places of interest?

How might we enable students manage time effectively? 

Feature prioritisation with KANO + MoSCoW

The Kano model is useful in gaining a thorough understanding of the user’s needs and it's relevancy while the MoSCoW helps to priortise features. A fusion of these two tools provided further clarity and was majorly informed from insights gotten from the 'How might we' questions.

Develop

Crazy 8s & paper sketches 

Crazy 8s were utilized to sketch out a wide variety of solutions to the challenges. Eight ideas were sketched rapidly in a period of 8 minutes for each screen so as to think quickly without being invested in a particular idea. I merged the meaningful and best parts of the eight sketches of each screen for the main idea used to create wireframes to be prototyped and tested. These are some examples: 

The combined ideas I got from the crazy eights were sketched for each screen. This helped me extract several ideas quickly before getting invested in the low fidelity wireframes.

Creating low-fidelity wireframes

Transforming the paper sketches to digital wireframes, these are some of the low fidelity screens that I prototyped and used to carry out user testing:

The Information Architecture (IA)

The user would be greeted by the splash and onboarding screen briefing on the features of application before signing up and being directed to the home screen. 

The menu bar contains 5 links which are home, places, food, activities and resources screens.

The profile screen contains link to  other features in the application which are favourites, quests, leaderboard, deals & rewards, finance manager, planner, settings and support.

The settings screen consists of some applications settings integrated with some accessibility features like language setting and adjusting the font size. 

User testing 

After creating low fidelity prototype from the digital wireframes, to ensure the application structure and features were okay before moving to a more advanced stage (high fidelity design) I conducted user testing with few participants. I also considered using the digital wireframe screens for the test so that the participants were not distracted by the design. I provided short scenarios and gave them the prototype to make their way through the  user journey without any external influence as if unsupervised. There were feedbacks of both negative and positive nature and i made essential changes based on these feedbacks I received. These are some questions and responses in regards to the application structure:

Modifications

The insights from the tests were recorded and using affinity diagrams, I sorted the insights into different level of priorities (based on the impact to the user flow) which I then considered and modified according to its priority. These are some modifications iterated:

The search button was not visible for several participants so I placed it in a central part of the UI. 

Some participants expressed annonyance in the lack of text for the top selections. I realised that the images may not communicate well enough and so I added texts under every element’s image to enhance clarity. 

Task flow

 Based on the user testing, I created task flows to visualise the journey required to complete a specific task in a given scenario. 

Creating the style guide

Before proceeding to the design of the high fidelity screeens and prototype, I created a style guide to govern and enforce design guidelines to be used throughout the design process and provide a visual language for the application.

Deliver 

As much as I always love the process, a project outcome is really satisfying. It shows how the entire process comes together to form something meaningful and provide solutions. Some of the screens of the final deliverable (although a UX project is never final) can be seen below:

Onboarding and signup screens

Onboarding screens to welcome users to the application.

Home, places, food, activities & resources

Through the application, users can check exciting places in Glasgow based on recommendations or categories as well as popular foods and activities to do in Glasgow. Users can also book event tickets within the application.

Interactive map

As an application for students new to the city, it features an interactive map that helps users to find a place, check distance, ETA and how to get there. Users can also look up the reviews and see photos of the place.

Settings & Profile

For accessibility considerations, the settings screens allows users to change preferred languages and adjust the font sizes. Users can also switch between light and dark mode. There is also a separate profile screen that takes the user to several features within the application.

Finance manager & Planner

The application has a built-in finance manager and planner to manage student's time and finances. Users can manage their budgets and track their spending in the finance manager and with the planner, they can set reminders and plan events into dates, categories and favourites to ensure they are always on top of their day and never miss anything.

Unique selling point (USP) : Gamification

The application unique selling point is gamification to ensure the users remain engaged and make the user experience enjoyable. This feature enables students around the city to go on treasure hunts and find unique barcodes that they scan in order to get rewards. This feature encourages students to explore the city and get rewarded for doing so. The application also has a leaderboard where users can climb up the ranks and progress in levels. It shows how well the user is accustomed with the city and comes with bragging rights and prizes.

View the project demo:

UX Design project demo video.mp4

Takeaway

Reflecting on the project...

This project was an interesting task to me. As I carried out this project while being a student in a new city, it was very relatable and engaging and i was able to understand through research that it greatly appealed to alot of new students coming into a new city as well. As the target audience was already stated in the brief, I learnt to narrow down my research to a very specific audience and also eradicate my biases that I may have for this demography. Foe example, I assumed that students 18- 24 years of age will be single students coming into the city. However, I was able to carry out adequate research proving otherwise.  I avoided my assumptions getting in the way of actuality to ensure that the application design is as inclusive as possible.

Limitations and next steps 

As the scope of this design project was limited to city of Glasgow, it will be great to expand in the future to solve this problem for students coming to study in other cities or countries.

Due to time constraints, there are features that could not be added to the final deliverable. However, iteration never ends and with further research, this application can always be improved.

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