Mingle Hall

Designing a charades-based mobile app to help students meet during the pandemic

Introduction

How can we replicate the informal communication provided by in-person lectures so that students can find study partners suited for them?

So what’s missing in Zoom University?

Research Insights

  1. All participants expressed a desire to meet more people, and couldn’t do so through Zoom lectures.

Refining the People Problem

During COVID-19, students not only want to meet more people, they wanted to find others they’d specifically get along with.

Persona

Claire, our main persona for Mingle Hall

Design

Affinity Diagramming and Brainstorming

Virtual whiteboarding session including affinity diagramming and ideation

Choosing our main design solution.

Main Scenario

  1. During the second half of the first lecture of a course, the professor will instruct students to open our app, framing it as a social opportunity to meet other students in the course.
  2. Within the app, students build a quick profile by entering basic information like names, emails, and phone numbers. The app then organizes students into teams where they will compete in a virtual game of charades.
  3. Students will play the game 4 times in a different team each time.
  4. Within the app’s game history, students can use the scores from different games to determine who they worked with best.
  5. Students can then directly message each other and/or form group chats.

Rationale

  • Students get to informally meet each other and break the ice.
  • Students get a wide range of exposure to others by playing so many different games
  • Matching occurs in a natural context through actual social interaction.
  • The app also serves as a central hub to find classmates and message them.

Storyboarding and Initial Sketches

Paper Prototyping and Low Fidelity Testing Insights

The paper prototype I made for the first round of user-testing

Paper Prototyping Observations and Feedback

  • Participants liked the idea of using a game to meet people.
  • Some participants used game history scores to determine who they wanted to contact while others were confused. Overall, they would prefer more personality-based information to find compatible partners.
  • Some participants were worried about their privacy, fearing they’d get messages from people they didn’t know or didn’t want to work with.

Shaping the Medium Fidelity

Themes

Color

Typography

Medium-Fidelity Interaction Design Decisions

Conducting Usability Testing

  1. Some participants weren’t able to gauge the rules of charades
  2. The Star Rankings system was confusing and raised privacy concerns as to whom the ratings could be seen by
  3. The Game History wasn’t seen as a resource to find others
  4. The profile message button lacked discoverability

Iterating from Participant Feedback

Final Flow for Mingle Hall

Final Prototype Demonstrations

Prototype Made with Figma
Prototype Made with Figma
Prototype Made with Figma

Reflection

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