Role

UX+ UI Design 

Interaction Design

Research

Prototyping

Wireframing 

Tools

Illustrator

Photoshop 

Illustrator  

Invision

Duration

4 Weeks

Project Type

Academic

Team

Xiaoyue Jing

The Challenge

UPhoto is a student led social club that facilitates the events and workshops around the theme of photography at Simon Fraser University. Currently over 850 people are registered members of the club. The club is led by a group of undergraduate students who act as club executives. Together with the opinion of members - executives  plans and organizes frequent events and workshops for members to have fun, socialize, and improve their photography skills.

Club executives lead a busy schedule, having to balance school and personal life. They find constant struggle to come up with new and interesting event ideas.

How can we keep the execs feeling inspired and help them to come up with interesting events for club members?

JUMP PAST SOLUTION TO RESEARCH

The Solution

UPhoto Channel is a place for executive team members of the SFU Photography Club to get ideas and inspirations for club activities and events.

Interesting articles about photography and events are curated in the app from famous blogs and websites. They can also easily share and discuss any link they like.

Key Features

Infinite Inspiration

The intial interface that an UPhoto executive will see when logging into their profile. Interesting articles and events about photography will be loaded automatically.

Share With Other Execs

An executive can simply edit and share an article with other executive members within the app.

Manage Account

The executives can control the users of the app. Only the executive members of UPhoto Photography Club can use this app.

Discovery

Ethnograpy Data

We met with some of the club executives and moderated an in-depth interview and took detailed notes. We also researched the group’s Facebook page postings and past events details. Together we were able to gather largely qualitative information about the culture of the group and challenges it faces. 

Cultural Probe

Next, we created a cultural probe, in the form of fun and engaging activities for the club executives to complete. This helped us to improve our relationship with the executives, and also gather data, so we could narrow our design focus.

Through the cultural probe we uncovered that students have heard about the club but they were not engaging with it because the activities and events seemed boring and unexciting. Executives on the other hand lead a busy life which prevents them from planning fun and engaging photography related activities.

Persona

Once we had collected sufficient data, my teammate and I created personas to help us think about the goals, desires, characteristics of the executive members, and to guide us throughout the design process.

Participatory Workshop

My teammate and I facilitated a participatory design workshop with few executives from the SFU Photography Club. We designed some fun tasks for them. The aim was to get input how users would design their own app. 

Definition

After going through each process (ethnography data, cultural probe, and participatory workshop) we uncovered different issues of the club. After the research we found that the biggest problem of the club was lack of inspiration for organizing fun and photography related activities. 

(RE-) Framed Problem

How can we keep the execs feeling inspired and help them to come up with interesting events for club members?

Ideation

Some initial ideation and wireframes

Wireframing

For designing the interface of the app, I first began on paper by sketching the interface. Then, moved to digital and started making low fidelity wireframes in Axure.

User Interaction

The interactions helped us develop the mental model that the user would experience throughout the app.

Logo & Branding

We wanted a logo that is related to photography and  wanted to include “UPhoto Exec Channel” in the logo so that it clearly shows that the app is only for UPhoto Executives and not for general members.  Main focus was form, shape and typography. 

Prototyping & Testing

After many iterations, we created a prototype and tested with the Executive members of the club. 

Delivery

Executive member of the UPhoto Photography club liked our prototype and the seamless design of the app. We handed over the final prototype and created a video for this project.

© Warda Ferdous | Product Designer | wferdous@gmail.com