PROBLEM STATEMENT
Students often struggle to build meaningful connections on campus.
Despite being surrounded by peers, many students feel isolated. Post-pandemic declines in social connectivity have made forming relationships and finding belonging even more difficult. This can lead to mental struggles and even substance abuse.
ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Meade, Jill. “Mental Health Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children and Adolescents: A Review of the Current Research.”
Flesaker, Michelle, et al. “Loneliness in the College Student Population: Prevalence and Associations with Substance Use Outcomes.”
How might we make it easier for students to form genuine friendships and connections in their everyday campus experiences?
USER RESEARCH
I conducted interviews with students across campus to understand how students form connections.
With a group of other designers, we interviewed students across different majors and class years to gather diverse perspectives. The goal was to understand their experiences with finding friends and forming connections on campus, what was hard and what helped them the most.
INTERVIEW ANALYSIS
Through some affinity mapping and analysis, we determined the main ways students find connection on campus:
Proximity and frequent interaction, both online and in-person, help develop and deepen connections
Shared experiences and struggles can quickly build connections and serve as a natural starting point for relationships.
IDEATION
How might we improve engagement with campus connection resources while aligning with how students naturally form relationships?
Clubs and classes are common ways students find peers to connect with. They both provide opportunities to experience shared experiences and struggles, and force proximity.
Shared interests are a great conversation starter, and can lead to doing those activities together which creates shared experiences and encourage proximity.
Social media works well as a low-effort, low-commitment way to stay connected and regularly interact with peers.
Fear of attending events alone discourages students, especially more introverted ones, from utilizing provided campus connection resources.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
LO-FI WIREFRAMES
Users can set their own and see others' interests, hobbies, classes, and clubs to find common ground and start conversations. To protect privacy, full schedules and club details are visible only to friends, while strangers can see only mutual classes and clubs.
Users can host or join events, including those run by peers, clubs, or the school. They can see who’s attending, start conversations, and invite friends to go together. This makes events feel less intimidating since users can connect beforehand or get familiar with who will be there, though it does raise a tradeoff between privacy and familiarity.
By incorporating familiar features from platforms like Instagram, Reddit, and X, users can post, comment, like, and message, making it easier to build and maintain friendships on the platform.
FEEDBACK
3rd year, Pre-Med @ Brown University
When I'm meeting new people, I think about anything similar that we can click on, so like major, classes, hobbies, events we've attended together.
RESULTS
After conducting usability testing and iterating on feedback, I designed and prototyped hi-fi screens.
FEATURES
LIMITATIONS
There are a few limitations I was unable to address within the scope of this project:
Privacy Concerns
After several iterations, there is no fully reliable way to authenticate classes, schedules, and clubs, creating a potential risk for breach of privacy.
Social Media, Stigmatization, & Moderation
Studies show that social media can inevitably lead to some stigmatization, requiring heavy moderation—potentially by the university—which undermines the goal of open, free communication.
Scheduling Conflicts
The “random event of the day” can be hard to schedule for most users, since only class schedules are considered, not other commitments like clubs, jobs, or personal plans.
FINAL TAKEAWAYS
Privacy Concerns
I learned to design with user safety, privacy, and emotional impact in mind, balancing tradeoffs between them, since these concerns are always critical in social media styled apps.
Translating Real World Behavior
I learned to translate real world social behaviors into app features, understanding how people form friendships and interact in everyday contexts.
UX Research Collaboration
I gained experience collaborating with other designers to synthesize research findings and iterate on design concepts.