Groupie
In collobration with Iryna keis, Nicholas Molina. A Coursera UI design capstone project.
Groupies is a service conceptualized and mocked-up in less than 2 months by our team and worked together from different location. Its a study app that helps the students who take education from online platform to next level. Apart from the mentor assistance, forum , topic discussion it also helps the students to find the peer students who takes the same courses from the same location to meet in person and to study and to do the assignments together.
Begining
In the beginning, we had lot of questions whether it has to be a system or add on to an existing social network or a new app. We brainstormed more than 100 ideas and narrowed it down to 5 ideas. We also had some challenges, there are already existing app like slack , what would make our groupie app unique.
User Research
As our team was scattered around the world, we decided to interview 10 person each from where we are located. We recruited both students and working people who currently enrolled in online courses.
our team recruited participants from the work place and who taje online courses, we realized that many of the students looks for immediate assistance and they are enthusiastic to meet the peer students who take same or similar course and to work together and finish assignment/course along with them. Additionally, we also found that student discontinue the course if they don't get proper assistance or if there is no immediate help it induce lack of motivation.
Design Process
Based on the user interview, we proceeded to create storyboard and a low fidelity prototype.
As the first step we created a paper prototype and continued to evaluate our first prototype. We did both coginitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation. We found that we needed some changes in the design.
With the evaluation in the hand we moved on to creating our second prototype which is a high fiedlity prototype using figma.
On the login page, user have to enter their email id and create a password or they can signup with google accounts or facebook. The second page allows user to give details about their school , it could be either regular university or online platform.
The third page asks for extra details like location and interests.
We wanted our app to have all the other basic features along with the finding people from the same location. So we designed
a dashboard which allows the user to choose certain activities like creating studysets, flash cards, video chat, creating groups.
The unique feature about this app is finding the peer students who taking the same course, when the user give the information
about their course and the currently enrolled course it automatically synchronize the details which helps to find the existing groups and also to create new group.
Reflection
Overall, the biggest challenge was essentially making sure to avoid designing too much on all the other existing features
that other app that already provide and to be focused in making students meet each other and work together. With the time that we had, there was no way we could feasibly create a system that would completely cover
all the ascpects. We needed to focus on one feature that helps with the major problem that the online students face. If I were to do this differently (and/or had my team closer) I would dive deeper into the interface.