Student Alumini Networking
Application to connect University Students and Alumini
Key highlights of this project
Overview
Role & Responsibilities
AngelGrad helps students (and alums) connect with the right alums based on their backgrounds, interests, and goals while emphasizing tangible outcomes.
For students, AngelGrad helps connect with the right alums based on their current needs, interests, and goals.
For alums, AngelGrad helps give back and pay it forward to their school constituents by helping in ways they're uniquely positioned to.
Product Designer
User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing, Omnichannel Product Strategy
Project Team
UX Designer, Product Manager, React Native Developer, Backend Developer, QA, Scrum Master, Engineering Architect
Client
Project Summary
Business Objective
Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test among the USA's users, alumni, and Students of some top management schools.
Success Criteria
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Test prototypes with students and alumni for quick feedback
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Create progressive app for the users
Use Goals
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Create Alumni and student networks for individual universities
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Collaborate and take carrier guidance from Allumini
Challenges
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Understand the domain
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Testing prototype with real users
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Usability testing
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User behaviour analysis
Outcome
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Successful release of the application for alumini and students.
Business Objective
Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test among the USA's users, alumni, and Students of some top management schools.
Build a native mobile app and a desktop web app with essential features and some unique features. This platform will help students from various schools and universities make meaningful connections with fellow alums and get career guidance from them. It will be helpful for alums to connect to other alma mater and get all school updates in one place.
The mobile app lets Students connect with Alums formally yet effectively. They can schedule a call to discuss their career path, get exceptional guidance from them, and much more! Students can have one on one chats.
User Research
Identify the ways students can find, connect and get guidance from alums. Also, Alums can find & join other Alma mater and get all school updates.
The scope was to build a Minimum Viable Product(MVP) to test among all these students and alums, which will help gather requirements and user responses for further product launch phases.
The team ran research based on the preliminary survey findings. The client conducted the primary survey for students and alumni from top management schools. The outcome was that Students (Primarily from the final year of their education) wanted career guidance based on their skills. Also, Alums wish to help them with time rather than money.
The requirement was that Students should be able to connect reach out to alums easily, have text-based conversations with them, and schedule a call based on their availability to get the guidance.
Fig: Screenshot of research analysis created for university students and alumni of Kellog University
Insights
After conducting user interviews, and analyzing the gathered data, I was able to categorize the insights into these 3 categories
Students
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Need carrier guidance based on skills
Alumini
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Ready to spend time with them instead of monitory help
Connect
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Easy Connect
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Text-based interaction
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Scheduled meetings
Information Architecture
The interviews were conducted with stakeholders to understand the features of the applications, target personas, target schools, and product ecosystem.
We also tried to understand the client’s vision of the product, the unique feature they want to integrate with the application, and how we can achieve that in the given timeline.
To estimate the number of the screens in the app, we created the Site Map and based on the site map we went deep and created the end to end proposed Information Architecture
Fig: Screenshot of Information Architecture using Miro (Digital collaboration tool)
Proposed Workflow
Post finalizes the scope of MVP, an initial structure for the mobile app was defined, with the following workflow and interactions.
The end-to-end proposed Work Flow was also defined for the app's basic actions, such as the functionality of the features, interactions.
Define Interactions
The team discussed the concepts for visualizing these workflows, and we started with basic wireframes for each section workflow.
Based on validated concepts, the team created high-fidelity prototypes for testing among the users.
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The Solution
The final flow of the screens was discussed and finalized based on the testing done. The Visual designs were made for the mobile app (MVP) and then based on the Client requirement. We also created the basic features for the Desktop web app. We created brand guidelines based on the keywords that represent the application's personality and the value they want to deliver as a product to users.
Student Onboarding
Feed
Alum Onboarding
Network
Messanger
My Calender
Profile
Notifications
Search
Menu
Reusable Assets
Considering the scope of work for the next features created a reusable asset library for consistency of experience.
Project Learnings
1. Simplicity is strength
As a designer, we are often lured by attractive, trendy, and out-of-the-box designs. But, We must always remember the ‘why’. The primary goal is to understand the user, and their problems and then come up with a design that solves them.
2. Prioritize
Create a strategic plan to launch an MVP. This helps deal with out-of-scope requests that could potentially derail the project and helps deliver a quality product on time.
3. Seek out feedback early and continually
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. Keeping the stakeholders/users in the loop and testing solutions in whatever form (paper, low-fi, or hi-fi) as early as possible saves an ample amount of time and rework.
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