Whats Up UCSD
Web App Design and Implementation
No 1 About Project
Whats Up is a Web Application that allows University Students to voice their opinions about anything on campus. It was designed by a group of three students in a UI/UX course at UC San Diego. The application was inspired by UC San Diego students having difficulty expressing their feelings and opinions about the things that bother them on campus.
No 2 Role
- UI/UX Designer
No 2 Key Tasks
- Create wireframes
- Conduct Interviews
- Styling
- User Testing
No 2 Tools
- HTML
- CSS
- Illustrator
- Pen & Paper
- Github
- Bootstrap
No 3 The Process
Needfinding
In order to pursue this project, we had to figure out if there was an actual need for it. We decided to look at current ways UCSD students can express their opinions. After a while of searching and calling the campus operator, we found long lists of a procedure for student grievances but not really a way to send complaints through an online message. We decided to interview students about how they feel about the campus and what problems/issues they feel. We also asked everyone how they cope with these problems and how they express them. Mostly every student we interviewed mentioned that all they did was talk to their peers to express how they feel. Based off of these issues and our interviews, we decided a social media type application where UCSD students can express how they feel and also make their opinions and suggestions actionable.
Storyboarding
For our app we drew a series of storyboard to understand our users and come up with scenarios in which the app could be used.
In this storyboard, two students are struggling finding parking and use the "UCSD Complaint Box" (Yup, we definitely iterated on that name) app to express their concerns.
Our first ideas ranged from making an application where students can complain about issues on campus to having students create and organize peaceful protests together. We narrowed down our ideas to three in which we made paper prototypes for.
Paper Prototyping
After creating three paper prototypes on three different ideas, we came across the idea of a social media type application in which students can get together to sign petitions, comment, and react to user created topics.
