2022

UOMO

UOMO is a mobile app designed specifically for college freshman to expand their social life.

What I did

Interview
Research

Visual Design
Interaction Design

Timeline

3 days

(Hackathon Project)

Team

Qianmu Yang

Yingjie Shi

Kexin Wen

Prompt

This is a Hackathon project for UX/UI Designathon of McMaster University, the design prompt is “The user is unfamiliar with college after high school struggling with a different lifestyle, and is finding the balance between social and school life”. The user feels “FOMO” and insecurity from people who have quickly fit into the new life. For expand the user’s social life, the user also needs to work out the casual speaking words and sentence.

Our team’s goal is simple yet highly personal - building and improving people’s sociability and mental health hygiene. Delegating tasks by strengths, we created the end-to-end experiences of features:

Daily Planner

Discovering Hot Spots, Hangouts Spots and Career Services

Free Ideation Playground

Language Learning Assistance

Background & Research

The target user currently struggles with...

The available college social mobile applications experience can be fragmented and confusing, as popularized among the school mobile app, Meetup and Notion. While most students rely on it to provide academic planning, information about campus events, services, and resources, including career services, it often serves outdated content, limited customization, and lacks student Involvement.

This leaves student bodies to outsource other applications and platforms with scattered information that most find very time consuming and the accuracy of the information pool uncertain.

Meet Up

My New School App

Notion Planner

How do we design a user-friendly platform that helps users overcome the fear of missing out and social anxiety, while also providing resources for improving communication skills and managing their time effectively?

UOMO leverages an all-in-one solution system for student social service community engagement. Differing from other platforms, UOMO aims to support student’s college campus needs with a more holistic engaging experience by having integrated information resources and social engagements.

What are the current painpoint of the college mobile app? How should we solve the problem by an additional platform?

What are the industrial standards and trends? What can we learn?

What is the ultimate goal for

UOMO? How would the app

support them?

User

Market Landscape

Goals

User Interview
User Journey

Market Analysis

Oppotunities &
Interview

UOMO addresses the challenge of helping students seamlessly adapt to college life in unfamiliar environments. It tackles issues like fear of missing out, lack of connection, and the social gap between Gen-Z and Millennials. By fostering an engaging and inclusive student community, UOMO creates opportunities for better integration, informed decision-making, and meaningful social experiences.

To get to know the user’s transition to college experience, my team conducted 15 in-person interviews with half locals

and half international students for an inclusive pool feedback. The questions provided a framework for our research,

competitive analysis, and user testing. We asked the participants a few of the following questions to lead the conversa-

tions:

Time Manegement

Can you describe your typical daily routine during the semester?

How do you currently plan and keep track of important dates, assignments, exams, and deadlines?

What tools or methods do you use to stay organized?

Culture Adjustment

How do you discover and stay updated on social events, clubs, and organizations on campus?

Have you used any social resources platforms for college-related networking and event discovery?

...

Social Network

Can you describe your experience with college career services?

What frustrations have you encountered when seeking guidance through your college’s career services?

...

Affinity Diagram

Insights

Engaging Social Network

Students strive to remain current, build and enhance their own groups through a creative and gamified incentive system to foster a sense of community.

Access to Resources

Students would like to reach to local resources, trending culture and campus services.

Effective Tasks Tracking Flow

Users are struggling with figuring out how to construct a time schedule, track work capacity efficiently and how to sort tasks into categories.

Seamless Career Learning

& Exploring Experience

Target audiences are unfamiliar with school resources and job markets, so they actively looking for abundant career resources and assistance with job advice.

Market Analysis

We have conducted market research on college mobile apps that targets aspects in Life Planner, Social Events Set Up, User Reviews and Recommendations based Hotspots. We’ve chosen three of the leading mobile app brands in the three aspects to understand their service’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Many of the apps are optimized in achieving their goal in the criteria, rather than optimizing a dedicated experience for students academic lifestyle transition and needs.

Sarah, 18
New York, NY
Freshman Uni Student
Single
INTP (MBTI)

Background

Sarah is transitioning into post-secondary school from high-school and isn’t quite sure on how to tackle a completely different lifestyle away from home, Cape Town, South Africa.


She felt lost when she arrived at the new school and as an international student, she is eager to learn about the new environments, culture and the people around her.



Goal

  • Make new friends.

  • Need to organize and planning staff for the transition.

  • Learn more casual speaking English.

  • Have common topic with her peers.

Pain Points

  • Learning English as a secondary language, Sarah is unfamiliar with casual speaking terminology.

  • Allocating time for a social life, physical activity, extra-curriculars, academic studies, personal care is hard.

  • Feeling FOMO’ (fear of missing out) and insecurity from those around them who have quickly adapted to the new life.

  • Sarah is often in a rush for school work and can’t spend much time on an organizing app.


Needs

  • A tool helps her organize her life schedule.

  • Resources of school life, places for hanging out, job opportunities.

  • A way to build new network.


Empathy Map

We break down the responses from the interviews and set from persona’s identity to mocked up a general user’s empathy map. This helped us to map out our potential audience having a better understanding of their reasons behind actions.

Information Architecture
Through our research, we identified the following necessary features to address the pain points of freshman college students.


1

A user-friendly platform that informs students about activities outside of school.


2

A tool that helps students balance their school and personal life for better time management.

3

A resource that provides guidance on career paths.

Low-Fidelity Design

Wireframe

Once we mapped out the information architecture’s structure, we gained a better comprehension of our objectives. This enabled us to refine our design iteratively before advancing to the final development phase. Throughout this journey, we clarified the user flows and did exploration and assessment of various design blueprints, consolidating critical components in the most user-friendly ways.

Visual Identity

Uomo’s color palette was chosen to embody a sense of power and boldness. The combination of orange and black creates an aesthetic reminiscent of a sunrise in the dark, instilling a sense of hope for users to seamlessly integrate into their social lives and confidently navigate through their new environment.

High-Fidelity Design

Design Solution



01

Campus Connect

A unified platform for hot spots, events, and job opportunities, with a synced Google Calendar for easy access and planning.




02

Balance Your School Life with Ease

Organize daily tasks and visually distinguish activities with color-coded scheduling. Customize your calendar's theme, colors, and logo for a personalized experience.




03

Career Resources for Freshmen

Uomo provides workshops, job opportunities, and a formal language dictionary designed to support college freshmen learning English as a second language in navigating the job market and enhancing their professional skills.




04

Event Playground

Discover random events when feeling bored or indecisive. Connect and network with others while tracking your achievements, all in one engaging platform.


Reflection

The Power of Research in Design

Good designs are grounded in research. While limited time can restrict deep dives, we’ve learned that every design decision must be backed by logical reasoning. The stronger the evidence behind a decision, the more effective the outcome.

Prioritizing User Experience Over Aesthetics

Initially focusing on aesthetics before user research impacted our design thinking. We realized too late that prioritizing user experience first leads to more effective and user-centered designs.

Highlights

The Power of Communication

Collaborative brainstorming helped our group explore unique ideas, challenge perspectives, and develop innovative approaches by building on each other’s thoughts.

Collaborative Structure: Strength in Roles

Clear role assignments allowed each team member to utilize their strengths, fostering efficient and effective design decision-making.

Copyright 2024 by Qianmu Yang