AnnounceMate

This app concept is a custom aggregator app concept for School of Design & Arts. Its purpose is simple: simplify the way students navigate SDA-related announcements. A product of a 14-week UI/UX design study, this utilized the process of human-centered design to come up with the solutions presented herein.

About The Project

Problem

Students tend to miss important events and reminders as announcements come through many different channels.

Insight

Differing preferences and online presence create a gap between students and the information they need, when they need them.

Goal

Help students stress less on information management by consolidating different office sources under one roof.

My role ⚊ Research & UI/UX Design

Lead a team of 4 researchers, was responsible for surveys, graphic design, and final presentation.

Discovery

This phase of HCD research reminded me that listening is beyond hearing, observing is more than looking, and being open to the unexpected transcends what's tried-and-tested. My teammates and I brainstormed problems students face on a daily basis, and agreed that we wanted to channel our efforts into tackling a significant but overlooked cognitive problem: managing announcements.

It might be trivial in foresight, but organizing dozens of notifications a day could be a full time mental load by itself. Currently, campus news are delivered via Facebook, Facebook groups, Messenger (these are three different worlds within one universe), Benilde mail, Twitter, and Bigsky.

Ideate

Cluster analysis

After we interviewed 30 students, we clustered their average answers and analyzed the data. (The scope of the application is limited to School of Design and Arts only. The school is comprised of 12 courses and a few thousand students.)

Findings

From these six, our group reflected on the three clusters we believe are most vital to bringing our vision to life: (1) Personal Preference, (2) Negative Feedback, and (3) Suggestions.

Preferences:

Students prefer graphic information over unordered lists
Students look forward to specific clusters of information
Announcements should be integrated with social media

Feedback:

Notifications are not categorized
Emails are delayed most of the time
Students tend to miss a lot of important reminders and events

Suggestions:

While emails are proper, we should explore other options to deliver these messages
There needs to be a new platform for MMA students specifically
Students should be diligent in checking their emails

How Might We

We then averaged the responses and created 9 HMW (how might we) questions, but these are what we narrowed them down to:

How might we cater to students that prefer graphic information over text-heavy announcements?
How might we help students scan a lot of information efficiently?
How might we prioritize the announcements that concern the students?
How might we create a new option to efficiently deliver campus-related announcements?

After this, we again voted which design challenge we feel is the most exciting, innovative, and practical. It was unanimous:

How might we create a new option to efficiently deliver campus-related announcements?

Implementation

Stress less on organizing.

Announcements are carefully laid out to ensure that the user’s main areas of concerns are accessible from the feed.

The top level of banners feature general posts
The second level includes the biggest area of segregation among student clusters: their programs/courses
The subsequent tiers let the user personalize their app experience by making other filters easier to reach

Log in exclusive to students only

Logging in the app is exclusive to students of the college with an ID number and an active Student Information System (SIS) account.

The system automatically syncs the credentials as it changes quarterly.

Management and scheduling calendar

The app is equipped with a customizeable calendar to help manage events, and track tasks.

Events that are coming close are highlighted in red, while the ones at max a week away is green. Else, items are uncolored by default.

Easy access information and contact details

For questions relating to the app and the school, an accordion-style color-coded phone directory of campuses and a complementing FAQ page is accessible offline.

Real-time push & in-app notifications

To enable certain features such as push notifications, permissions from the user will be asked. If the user opts out, we’ll store the notifications internally and the user can access them anytime offline.