BASE App, is a mobile application targeted towards university students, to make their university life more organized and also make networking easier. Moreover, it will be useful for professors, and university clubs who are organizing events and volunteer opportunities.
As part of expanding its user base, BASE wanted to deploy a feature that makes it easier for students see their daily commitments on a calendar. Currently, there is no way for students to see all their activities in one centralized place, which hurts BASE given that local competitors already had this feature.
BASE app can be used as a tool for users to plan their student life. Including their class schedule can be key. Not only for them to organize their time but also in case any other user decides to invite them to an event of their interests.
However, if it is not organized properly in the profile it can be very confusing for the user to use it. My task was to try to incorporate the class schedule within the profile without making it complicated to manage courses.
I decided to use the Google and iOs calendar mobile applications as my first guide to design this feature. I went through the guidelines for date pickers, tables, and dialogues. My goal was to understand the usual format used on google applications and apple applications.
I tried to use the crazy 8 method, which is doing a series of simple sketches on a piece of paper folded into 8 parts. I like to use this method to lay down different ideas and later on decide which ones to keep or merge. Instead of 8 drawings I only did 6 of them on my iPad. The screens were kept at a minimum. I wanted it to be a very simple feature. I came up with an idea that would be very intuitive for users to input their information.
I decided to make a sitemap, calendars can get very complicated because of all of the tasks that can be added but I was asked to reduce my scope to only add classes.
For the prototype I tried to incorporate it on the already existing profile on the BASE App. I decided to add it to a another tab. That way it would be easier to access it. As for the features I will proceed to explain some of them next.
See PrototypeAfter creating the overall idea of the feature I did a prototype on Figma and then I did two rounds of testing. The goal was to evaluate if the feature was intuitive enough so the users could add a class to the schedule without getting confused.
I conducted the test with 5 students from FDU, they are from different years but they also share the same organizational problems. They are all used to planning their days using google calendar and the university website.
I wanted to make sure the design while very simple it still made sense to the user and I wasn’t leaving anything behind. Success meant the users would be able to complete the task and would understand how to input their information. Out of the 5 students who participated, all of them understood the prototype but 2 of them expressed that the design had some discrepancies which made them confused. The prototype was made for iOS but it had many google elements and that was a bit confusing for the students. Therefore I decided to change the prototype to make it more like an iOS application.
I did receive some feedback from the students, one of them was that even though I was using the buttons and layout of an android application. The status bars were the ones used in iOS. Therefore, I should be following the iOS standards to have a homogeneous design. I do recognize that because my device is an Android I got sidetracked. Moreover, during my competitive analysis, I did use Google’s material design more closely than iOS.
After presenting my work to my coworkers they did the observation that I should have done grayscale wireframes. I skipped this part mostly because of time constraints and since the graphic line was already decided it was easier for me to jump right to do the high-fidelity mock-ups. Although I do recognize some mistakes that could’ve been recognized in grayscale wireframes.
I think I could’ve used more design systems other than Google and iOS such as Orbit by Kiwi or IBM Design language. Also, I could’ve explored different ideas from these design systems and adapted them to the design.
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