Tech Connect
Tech Connect is a networking app that allows students and alumni to connect and ultimately build projects together.
Project Type
Junior Design Project with 5 team members and client Christen Steele, Director of Computing Career Services at Georgia Tech.
Audience
Georgia Tech alumni and College of Computing students
My Role
UI/UX Designer
Frontend Developer
Tools
Figma
Github
VS Code
Contribution
User Research
Ideation
Paper Prototype
High-fidelity Prototype
Duration
10 weeks (Fall semester) for UX Design
14 weeks (Spring semester) for development
Background
Back in 2019 and 2020, Covid-19 swept the world, and internships went virtual with many being canceled entirely. Students found themselves in a situation where they were not able to get real-world experience at an important time, especially for juniors and seniors. An application like Tech Connect became ever more apparent.
What can we create and change to improve user experience amongst networking apps?
Research
Before we began to research user experience on existing networking apps, we had key issues to resolve:
How much interest do alumni have in working on an alumni-student project?
How much interest do students have in working on an alumni-student project?
Although we believed this app was necessary, given Covid-19 took over the job industry as well, we needed to gain a holistic understanding of what the alumni and students of College of Computing thought of working with each other.
Survey
Due to our limited time and accessibility to students and alumni, we created a survey with a mix of qualitative and quantitative research questions to conduct our research on potential users for our app. Out of 111 responses, 46 responded to whether they were interested in working with each other, and approximately 76% of participants were interested.
Key Findings
Through our survey, we also asked users about their opinions on LinkedIn, and what features they liked and disliked, since LinkedIn is one of the major networking apps that many people use globally. Many users mentioned that being able to curate feeds based on interests was one of the key features of the app. Some features that participants disliked included the inability to outreach someone without being connected. Using this data, we were able to know which features to implement in our design for positive user experience.
Design Iteration
While brainstorming what kind of design we would implement, we analyzed social media apps many people use today such as Facebook and Instagram, and this sparked the idea of making our app similar to dating apps. People today have very short attention spans, so it is important to not make designs overly complicated or wordy in order to have good user flow and experience.
Laying our design foundation inspired by dating apps allows users to quickly view the profiles of students and alumni with no other complicated steps and having efficient functionality.
Testing
Through user testing and heuristic evaluation, there were multiple errors and bad functionality that we did not recognize when designing our prototype.
*Due to limited time for the semester, we were assigned to do self-user testing and have a heuristic evaluation done by another team.
User Testing & Heuristic Evaluation
Our prototype had many positive feedbacks as it followed Norman’s design principles well with features such as consistency with color theme with Georgia Tech official colors, consistent designs and features on both alumni and student ends, and high affordance by using universally used symbols. However, like with all designs, our prototype was not perfect and was missing features that could have been added. Our evaluators highlighted a few potential issues, such as
Missing navigation button to return to the previous screen when creating a profile.
Lack of Error Messages and Help Documentation (Feedback).
Although these issues did not interfere with any user activity, resolving these problems allowed us to redesign the app to have more functionality and a smoother user flow.
Coding + Final Product
Using React Native, the frontend developers of the team, including myself, developed the design of the app we have created the previous semester. We collaborated with the backend developers to deliver the final product to our client at the final sprint.
Below is the demo video of our final app.
*It was the first time many of our team members used React Native, in which we had to learn in 1-2 weeks, so the final design looks a bit different from what was in our prototype.
Takeaways
Communication
Be direct and upfront to team members. Although our team followed agile methods and wrote retrospectives each sprint to efficiently work together and deliver each milestone at the end of each sprint, we have learned that not being upfront when a problem occurs at that moment can cause longterm damage. I have learned to respectfully confront other team members if there is an issue, and many of our problems were cleared ever since.
Prioritization
Being consistent with the original MVP (minimal viable product) is important. While coding our app, my team added small features each sprint because we believed it was necessary and would make the app more functional. However, due to this, we pushed back some other important features onto the next sprints due to lack of time, causing us to rush building the rest of the essential features that made up our MVP.
