Buddy—Allowing college students to access educational content quickly, easily, and efficiently.
UX/UI Design
Role
Visual design, UX research, marketing, branding.
Tools
Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop
Duration
8 weeks
Buddy is a mobile application concept designed for a user experience design class. It aims to help students organize their tasks, connect with their peers, access their courses quickly and easily. I originally designed the app in 2019 when I was still new to the UX field and decided to revisit it in 2020 to improve the usability and style of it.
Problem
Despite technology embedding itself into education all around the world, students still find themselves facing outdated teaching methods, overwhelming schedules, and a lack of connection to their professors and peers.
Solution
The solution is simple: design a mobile based application for college students. This app will allow students to access their Blackboard or Canvas content quickly and easily, manage assignments and events through a calendar, connect with their peers through a feed, and maintain their thoughts and ideas in a bulletin board.
The app's initial design was not user-focused. After reflecting on this, and thoroughly researching competitor apps, I learned that I had trouble following grids, using hierarchy, usability issues, and included unnecessary functions.
Careful evaluation and feedback from students at George Mason University told me that the original concept was too unorganized and difficult to navigate. This got me to thinking — How can I appeal to students and make their lives a little bit easier?
Original screens
By…
Improving connections. I want to help students reach out to their peers for help by providing them with a platform that has forums, group/video chats, and question-specific assistance on various assignments on Blackboard/Canva.
Organizing activities and assignments. Since it is a student-oriented app, it is vital to have a method of recording upcoming events, assignments, study sessions, etc.
Providing easy content reference. It would be more time consuming for students to ask school-related questions on a third-party app if they were forced to jump between their school’s designated learning app and Buddy. To simplify the process, I want to integrate those apps within Buddy. This way, referring to homework takes fewer clicks and less loading time.
Recording good ideas. Good ideas are constantly getting lost throughout the day. Many of us mistakenly trust our brains to remember these ideas and yet, we are faced with the tragedy of forgetting. I want to allow students to have the option to quickly log their ideas within the app and have it handy when completing assignments or communicating with their peers.
Below are the original Buddy screens I designed in 2018 for a user interface course.
Wireframes
Wireframes were created using Adobe XD. This process spanned 15-20 hours of creation and revision.
Final Screens
The prototype was designed using Adobe XD.
Color is used to differentiate between the different courses that the student is registered in. Through my competitive analysis, I found that Google Calendar, Canvas, and the IOS Calendar rely on color to label events, appointments, assignments, etc.
Courses, calendar events, and posts maintain a consistent color scheme throughout the app. The purpose of this is to ensure the student can remember what colors are associated with what courses. After frequent usage of the app, the student should instantly be able to remember what courses are listed under what colors.
Branding
The app's branding was a fairly difficult process to start with and ended with a successful merge of brand identity and content reinforcement.
I first aimed to appeal to a younger and more modern generation of students. The approach was meant to be hip/cool and make learning a fun process. Soon after developing these logos, I realized that the goal of the app is to be useful, not cool/fun.
The next iteration of the logo for the original concept was of an open book and basic sans serif type. The idea of this was to make it clear that the application was intended for students/schools. This is unsuccessful for many reasons.
The stroke is too light. The book and type will get lost in some screens/colors/sizes.
There is no brand distinction. It offers little memorability for the app.
It is unoriginal. Using a commonly used object in it's true form with no clever manipulation or context is an incorrect way to approaching logo design. Thankfully, I was able to learn from this mistake.
The final iteration of the logo for the redesigned app is simple and minimal. The colors represent the color coded system used throughout the app. The ellipses are layered on one another to deepen the meaning of the word, Buddy. The circles themselves are Buddies.
The reason I chose the name Buddy is to indicate that this app will literally be a student's buddy throughout their educational career. It is a toolkit meant to improve the student's connections, organization, and understanding.