Rutgers Community Connect

User Experience
Project Overview
Rutgers University needed a community hub for students to engage them within the university system. The goal was to enhance student engagement and collaboration. They encouraged open communication, diverse perspectives, and empathy to help aid students in building bridges and creating safe spaces in order for them to engage with one another more meaningfully.
My Contributions
As a group of six total team members, we collectively worked on each phase of the process. After gathering data through contextual inquiry, we fine-tuned our personas and their journey maps to understand our user's frustrations further. During the prototype design process, my goal was to ensure that the prototype operated smoothly to maximize results during user testing.
Rutgers Community Connect
UXPerts
October 2024
After conducting contextual inquiry, we learned that students wanted to find communities with like-minded people who shared similar values. Many students wanted a way to find out about clubs and events happening on campus. With our new findings, we decided to create an app around these ideas. Students should be able to open the app, see what events are going on, and filter their search to best cater to the experience they're looking for.
Usability Testing
Testing went well. Users found the prototype easy to navigate with minimal guidance. Most of our users liked the idea of many of the features we added, like navigation, map, and filtering. Some users feared implementing AI may violate their rights to privacy by recording too much user information, while others wanted to see the home page work like a social media feed.
Takeaways
Because our overall feedback for the prototype's usability was very positive, we focused on the technical feedback we received. We moved hashtags to the back-end part of the app; only users creating events would interface with tags. We plan to inform users about the use of AI and will not use it to record user data; it will only enhance the experience when using the app. We also chose not to implement any social media features into the mobile app.
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