Event Hub
Providing easy access to social events for University of Toronto students
In collaboration with UofT’s Innovation Hub
Team Members
Gloria Luk
Gabrielle David
Wesley Cheung
Malliha Fatima
Dania Mohsin
Role
Conducted User Research
Wireframed sketches on Figma
Prototyped product and created demo
Led visual design direction
Conducted Usability Testing
Project Length
Sept 2021 - Dec 2021
Tools Used
Figma
Mural
OVERVIEW
What is Event Hub?
Event Hub is a mobile platform designed for UofT students who can find all events from student groups, faculties, and programs. Discover events that interest you and meet other UofT community members!
The Problem
The current state of making connections with other graduate students has focused primarily on students finding social events through numerous emails, word of mouth, student-run events and social media platforms.
Our Goal
To provide a way for students to easily find the types of social events and services they are genuinely interested in and the student groups they wish to join.
USER RESEARCH
Secondary Research
The goal of our secondary research was to contextualize the problem of making connections in a university environment. We did this by looking at the existing data found in online research articles and blog posts. We also explored the current tools available for UofT Students to make connections, such as the student life website.
From our initial secondary research, our team found that for post-secondary students, creating a sense of belonging and building long-lasting and meaningful relationships were essential elements for a healthy and successful university experience.
Primary Research
Our team wanted to further understand the motivations and challenges for making social connections and how students felt about the resources that the university provided for fostering connections. We sent out interviews and surveyed UofT students.
We found that:
Their social connections came from people in the same courses
Making connections outside of their program was
Challenging due to the lack of opportunity and hectic school schedules
Interview Methods
RESEARCH ANALYSIS
User Persona
Why create a persona?
Our team wanted to visualize the context of our users’ pain points and seek opportunities from them.
Who is Newton?
Newton represents the results of our user interviews. Like our interviewees, Newton wants to look into social events offered by UofT, but is confused with the search process as there are too many resources and events.
Empathy Map
How does empathy affect user experience?
Empathy is a critical part of human-centred design and as researchers, when we put ourselves in a user’s shoes in order to understand their struggles, we can’t help but empathize with them.
Why an empathy map?
To better understand Newton, we created an empathy map to see what Newton would say, do, think, and feel while looking for social events to attend using data from our interviews.
Scenario Map
Our team used scenario mapping to understand how Newton would use approach his goal of making a connection at the event and his experience throughout his process.
As-Is Scenario
After capturing Newton’s potential behaviour and attitudes using the empathy map, our team gathered our learnings into an as-is scenario that mapped out a workflow, and the steps Newton would take to get to his goal.
To-Be Scenario
Next, we mapped how we envisioned Gabby's scenario "to be" with our design solution. While the steps she must take remain the same, her actions, thoughts, and feelings change dramatically—for the better, that is.
As-Is Scenario → To-Be Scenario
As-Is Scenario → To-Be Scenario
Prioritization Grid
The Process
Our team brainstormed multiple ideas that could help improve Newton’s journey which we referenced from our scenario maps.
Big Ideas
After voting on ideas, we narrowed our top choices down into a prioritization grid which scored them based on impact and feasibility. Marginal gains included ideas with low impact and feasibility, big bets represented ideas with high impact and medium feasibility, and quick wins had high impact with medium feasibility. Lastly, home runs represented ideas with high impact and feasibility.
PROTOTYPE
Lo-Fidelity Sketches
With our user research analysis, our team created low-fidelity prototypes for three key tasks to address our problem goal: (hills statement?)
How would Newton set up his event preferences?
How would Newton browse and filter through all social events?
How would Newton find and register for a popular event?
Lo-Fidelity Task Flow
Lo-Fidelity Task Flow
Lo-Fidelity Task Flow
Lean Evaluation
The Participants
After finalizing our paper prototype, we went straight into conducting our lean evaluation in order to get feedback. Initially, our scope was only within the graduate community, however, we recognized our design solution could be used by all students at U of T. Since we conducted a lean evaluation, we conducted remote quick and efficient usability testing, similar to guerilla usability testing.
Our team recruited 3 students (2 graduate students and 1 undergraduate student) at the University of Toronto who were representative users of our prototype. The participants were walked through the workflow for each task.
Key Findings:
Positive Feedback
Participants enjoyed the featured events homepage and would do most of their browsing there.
Participants liked how you could search for the popular events for specific event categories.
One participant liked how consistent the onboarding and registration processes were with other existing applications.
Negative Feedback
Participants did not like how they could not skip setting up their event preferences during the onboarding process.
Participants had trouble finding the button to take them to the filter menu.
Participants had trouble finding the button that would take them to the ‘Popular Events Page’.
Positive Feedback
Participants suggested users should be able to skip setting up their preferences during the onboarding process.
In the filter menu, a participant suggested the Date/Time filter option should have a “From and To” setting.
In the filter menu, a participant suggested to replace the distance meter with a map area view, to help users visualize the area location.
Changes
Our team used the lean evaluation feedback to inform our design decisions for our medium-fidelity prototype. With the feedback, here are a few key changes we made:
Task 1:
Understanding the importance of giving the users freedom of choice, we incorporated this feedback in our medium fidelity prototype by adding a “Skip and Do Later” button
Task 2:
We added the date and time window, and the map area view based on our participant’s suggestions.
Task 3:
Our team decided to change the layout of the popular page to split them into categories with side-scrolling to browse through the events instead of having to change the category filter at the top of the page. This would reduce the number of clicks a user would have to make.
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
Finally, our team created a medium-fidelity prototype based on the changes we made from the feedback from the lean evaluation.
Medium Fidelity Task Flow
Medium Fidelity Task Flow
Medium Fidelity Task Flow
EVALUATION
Usability Testing
Our team conducted usability tests to provide us with insights on our task workflows. This helped discover pain points within each task flow and led us to consider ways of improving features for a better user experience. Here’s what we wanted to find out:
Is the user able to know which popular events are happening in different event categories?
What are the attitudes of the users towards the onboarding process?
Do the filtering options meet expectations of users?
Observation
We recruited five University of Toronto graduate students who were interested in looking for social events and asked them to go through three tasks.Here are the tasks we asked participants to go through:
Task 1: This is your first time using this app, can you show me how you would go through the onboarding process?
Task 2: Can you show me how you would look for an event within the engineering faculty?
Task 3: How would you find the most popular event relating to art and sign up for it?
Post-Task Interviews
After our observation testing, we asked post-task questions to collect insights on participant’s attitudes towards the current workflow of the task and any related issues.
Usability Testing Results
Based on user responses and feedback, this is what we found:
Positive Feedback 👍
All participants mentioned how this app streamlined the process of finding UofT events .
Participants appreciated getting to see how many people were attending an event.
Overall, all participants found the application’s tasks workflow to be easy and intuitive
Pain Points 👎
A few participants were confused about the location feature as an option for filtering their event search results
Mixed reviews on the categories for filtering events were received.
Some participants mentioned feeling restricted by categories but also acknowledged that in a more finalized version they would expect more categories to filter by.
So What’s Next for Event Hub?
1. We want to explore how Event Hub could further enhance the sense of community amongst UofT students and make it easier to find and be a part of certain student communities within UofT through social events.
2. Further iterate on the medium fidelity prototype to address usability pain points discovered during the usability test.
3. Focusing on another key persona, the event organizer.
Personal Takeaway 🤔:
Adapting to Challenges & Uncertainties
This project has really taught me to think and act quickly in adapting in changing environments, and really embrace the unknown. The process is not linear, and it takes patience and appreciation for uncertainties!
Being Intentional
As our team was required to present our process biweekly in playback studios, I learned that these presentations challenged us to create the most effective, impactful flow that would stand out and deliver the message clearly to the industry professionals, without making it feel rushed.
Communication
This was the first time I had to work with a group of 5 for an entire semester. I found that by communicating our thoughts, feelings, and empathizing with one another, our team chemistry grew as the semester progressed.