The Client
Out client for this project was PurposeWorks, a company specializing in simplified team workspace solutions for businesses. Loop targeted colleges and universities. Our lead contact was Ian Andolsek, who at the time was a student working to pilot the platform at Haverford College.
Skills Involved
Customer Experience Design
Information Architecture
UX/UI Design
The Process
The first step to creating an experience that would help students connect with one another was mapping-out all of their needs; what would students want to connect about? what kind of information would they want to share with one another? how could these topics encompass personal and professional interests? how might they overlap?
By grouping these needs into themes, we were able to ideate on solutions for how we might each need with a particular experience.
Each experience started as a set of user journeys, which were further refined into wire frames, and finally, hi-fidelity prototypes.
With the help of the PurposeWorks team, we were able to test the proposed solutions with real students and get their feedback before the project was developed.
Ultimately, we uncovered that the social-media style structure that the platform was built upon was not the best way to encourage student engagement. The project morphed into a "quick matching" tool to help students find other students with similar interests on campus. From there, the group-interaction experience we created could be implemented with a greater desire from users for its existence.
The Final Product
Loop emerged as a robust platform where not only students, but also faculty and staff could come together in a way that supported their personal and academic interests. Despite a robust architecture, we learned that the core functionality needed to better suit students' day-to-day needs, and that many of their interactions were already occurring on other platforms like facebook, whatsapp, and groupme. The final version of Loop was much different than our original ideas, but still worked to address many of the needs that our early information architecture aimed to address.
