Pitt Mobile Redesign

 

Pitt Mobile is the official App of the University of Pittsburgh and delivers an enhanced Pitt Experience right to students’ mobile devices.

 

Role

Product Designer

Duration

3 months

Skills

Prototyping, Semi-structured Interview, Competitive Analysis, User Flow

Description of App

Pitt Mobile is the official App of the University of Pittsburgh.

  • Let Pitt students easily access schedules, grades, and assignments.

  • Help navigate University services.

  • Assist to plan out their days

  • Let students stay informed and connect with others

The Challenge

How can Pitt students improve their college lives by Pitt Mobile?

According to my research, 80% of Pitt students have neither heard nor used Pitt Mobile. As the official app of the University of Pittsburgh, it is supposed to serve all Pitt students in their college lives, but it has limited downloads(132 ratings from Apple Store) and received many negative feedbacks.

I. Discovery

 

01. App Audit

Before going further exploration of Pitt Mobile for understanding users, it is critical to have a comprehensive understanding of App itself. A redesign is never to ignore and disregard the current design and then create a completely new one based on personal preferences. There was probably a great deal of research and thinking devoted to the creation of the original solution. My goal of doing App Audit was to carefully investigate the current design to know what information and services it provides, understand how it works, and the intention behind each decision.

Additionally, it is valuable to identify key issues with the existing design, ranging from usability issues to visual flows, bugs, inconsistencies, wrong patterns applied, or exotic solutions without any reason. Furthermore, I found improvement opportunities based on discovered problems, which provided me with basic ideas for this redesign.

02. Competitive Analysis

I selected four apps that are related to Pitt Community or College life for case studies.

 
 

Insights

02. Well-organized information architecture

From case studies, the most obvious difference between good designs and bad designs is how good they are at organizing their information. A confused categorization will decrease usability dramatically.

01. Schedule as an independent page

A scheduling feature is extremely important and highly demanded by college students. Therefore, it should be easily accessed within the app and it is often designed as an independent page.

03. User Research

a. Research Problem

How do Pitt students manage their college lives currently?

 

User Interview

I conducted 12 unconstructed interviews where 1-2 students from each grade are randomly selected. During the interviews, I asked a general question about their college lives at the University of Pittsburgh to get familiar with and connect with them. Then, I grasped one interesting story or problem they faced to ask their behaviors and decision-making process; gradually, I directed their stories to focus on schedule, resources, staying informed, and community these four parts.

  • Since there were limited users for Pitt Mobile, it was difficult to obtain enough valid quantitative data by research methodologies like surveys.

  • Based on the fact that this App has low exposure and bad feedbacks, it is essential to have an in-depth understanding of users and their college lives.

 

Insights & Key findings

 

Finding01

For college students, the challenges and problems they encountered are not only from schoolwork but also from their personal lives.

For college students, “How to plan out a day“ is one of the most common issues in their daily lives because going to college is the first time for most of them to live independently. They are in need of assist with handling not only the academic schedule but also their personal lives. Students are active to reach out to new opportunities and activities to enrich their college lives.

 

Finding02

Connection with peers is an important part of college life. Fellow met in college is the major source of friends and consultants.

In college life, there are a lot of questions that are preferred or can be solved more efficiently by peers instead of authorities. The main resources of friends for college students are from the university. They need and want to highly interact and communicate with their classmates.

II. Define

 

What services can Pitt Mobile provide to help students manage their lives and connect with their peers, in order to improve their experience at the University of Pittsburgh?

The problem

 

Redesign objective

 

01. Complete Scheduling Experience with Personal Life

02. Create peer communication platform

03. Improve opportunity-hunt Experience

  • Make calendar feature visible and usable

  • Allow customization of schedule

  • Let students be accessible to activities and opportunities

  • Create a platform for Pitt students to communicate and interact with their peer

  • Allow group chat for bonding with classmates

  • Present relevant and important information to users based on their preferences

  • Prevent users from Information explosion and help them easily find needed info

 

III. Ideation&Design

01.Delivery

 

Calendar

A helpful Schedule Assistant

This Calendar clearly displays students’ daily schedules with a weekly view and daily view two modes. It also allows students to add a new event or due for organizing both academic and personal lives efficiently.

Additionally, this calendar feature allows users to search and add nearby events and activities by simply clicking on the availability block. It is efficient for users to plan out their days and at meantime enrich their college lives

 
 

Digest

Personalized information board

Instead of receiving countless emails and missing important ones every day, Digest presents course-irrelevant and ad-free information based on a user’s major joined organizations, and interests. Users are also allowed to “Favorite” info for dealing with it later. This collection of important information can greatly benefit students who seek opportunities and who suffer due to not checking email every day.

 
 

Pitrum

A forum for Pitt Panthers

Pitrum serves to provide a safe and friendly platform for all Pitt students to share and interact with their peers. They can ask all Pitt students for help at any time. Like other social media platforms, it allows users to comment, like, repost, and share ideas and information on it, building a close and highly interacted community for Pitt students.

 
 

Messages 

A uniform communication platform

With this communication platform, Pitt students will not suffer from missing important notifications from class or having troubles with reaching out to classmates due to no united communication platform. Pitt Mobile will automatically create class group chat and allow users to start a new conversation with anyone by entering Pitt's username.

 
 

Resources

Navigation to all resources

This page contains all university resources and services for students. Users can either find what they need by category or direct search. Emergency contact is at the right corner, ready for immediate help.

 
 

Account

A collection of supplements

Here, students can directly access frequently visited resources like ID Card and campus maps without a series of clicks. They can also customize Pitt Mobile and send feedback to improve it together.

 

02. Usability Improvement

 

a. Useflow

In order to solve the problem of inefficient information acquire experience, I simplified the user flow and make it obvious and visible for users to be able to find needed information with fewer steps.

Original VS Redesigned for remained features

 

Original User flow

 
 
 

Redesigned User flow

b. Hi-Fidelity

Original VS Redesigned for remained features

Original UI Redesigned UI

 

  • Took the Calendar feature to be an independent page because users frequently use it.

  • Utilized distinctive colors for each course for a more distinguishable schedule event at one peak.

  • Set the function of changing the calendar view on the right corner to be visible due to its high demand

  • Refreshed the User Interface for a better user experience.

  • Added a search feature to this part for efficiency when users find needed information in chats

  • Added group chat for users’ demand for bonding with classmates and other groups.

 

Original UI Redesigned UI

Original UI Redesigned UI

 

  • Made the search feature be more visible on this page for efficiency because it will cost users a lot of time to find what they need among tons of school resources.

  • Moved the search page to the last page because the right corner is closer and more accessible for users.

  • Deleted My Friends, My Calendar, My Courses, My Groups, My Upcoming Events, and My Activities from this page because they are not related and displayed repeatedly.

  • Moved the profile page to become a side menu due to its low demand and a small amount of information.

 

Original UI Redesigned UI

IV. Reflection

Look beneath the surface

From iterations of interviews for this project, I learned that user experience research is not limited to the investigation using the experience of a product—how and what they like or dislike of certain features of this application—but much more than that. It is not about the functions or services but instead, human behaviors and a question of ‘why’. And one of the most important jobs of UX designers and UX researchers is to keep digging further to find out what users truly need.

V. Future Work

If I have more time…

I would love to run several tests to examine my redesign. The test will be conducted in the form of A/B testing, which compares users’ performances in certain tasks on original and redesigned Pitt Mobile. With the quantitative data, I can identify more usability issues and carry them on to improve my design.