JAVY WANG

Project Introduction

After the Application Division Platform project Get5, as I accumulated some local resources and was in touched with the teachers during the university activities in Indonesia, I suggested working out an app which convenient to the communications in school. We discovered that students in Indonesia normally receive messages from their teachers by Emails, text messages and phone calls. Though the apps such as Line, Whatsapp are commonly used in Indonesia, but they are basically used between students and their friends, not for the communications in school. The university prefers an app to enhance the contacts between students and teachers. Thus, after the brainstorming, our team intended to provide a complete smart campus solution. I am mostly in charge of functional design, providing product support for our team in this project.

User research

Questionnaire&Persona

As I had a briefly understanding of the situation, I thought the problem is how to improve inner communication in university? In order to figure out problem, I led our team to do user surveys aiming at the teachers and students to figure out their needs and current experience. First, We made questionnaire in order to figure our inconvenient tasks in campus. Then according to results of questionnaires, we made second survey about details with these inconvenient tasks.  

According to results of twice quesionnaires, I did user interview with 10 students and 5 teachers, then I made persona. 

From user research, I found that

The inconvenience of study : all systems were separated and independent, the selecting course system, student information management system, library system and E-learning system, When students tried to search for the information or receive the messages from their teachers, they had to login different systems.

The inconvenience of campus life : the students may not be able to know the firsthand information; all information was scattered, the only official platform was the school website, there was no other concentrated platform to release the daily information for the student; students could only check the information on the school website, they won’t be able to send or receive information any time any where.

So our team chose to combine the education, entertainment and campus life together, bring out the one for all Smart Campus platform for the school.

SCENARIO MAPPING

According to the survey, we divided the smart campus’ function into 4 parts: News, IM, Blog and school system entrance. But how to design these functions? Then we began our Scenario Mapping analysis aiming at target users, meanwhile we used scenario mapping to line out the important and uncertain user cases and brainstorming together with the 6 Indonesian students and 5 teachers to make sure if those issues were actually existed. 

INTROSPECTION

At the beginning, the scenario was made by a pure Chinese team, we were totally stuck in Chinese mindsets instead of Indonesian’s, in many cases the supposed situations might be different from the Indonesian students’ actual situations, so we worked together with local student team in subsequent work.

Interactive Design process

Design Wireframe & Low-fi prototype

After confirming final functions, I designed wireframe and low-fi prototype in the beginning. According to experience in designing scenario, I invited 6 Indonesian students and 5 teachers to test our rough prototype and gathered useful feedback from them. 

 INTROSPECTION

Both students and teachers were hard to accept something new, though they were dissatisfied with current systems, but they don’t really want lots of changes. So when we worked on product functions, we followed their habits from offline to online, next, we remained only the core functions instead of some other complex functions in order to avoid the conflicts during the usage

Design High-fi prototype

I redesigned “News”， “Activity” and “Notification”  parts

Conclusion

As most Indonesians believe in Islamism, we pay particular attention to the language expression, we respect users from various cultural backgrounds and we won’t violate religious taboo.

Besides, universities students in Indonesia raise high demand for entertainment for Smart Campus. In addition to the basic functional design, we added independent small games to increase its interesting.

Furthermore, universities students in Indonesia also seek for personalization and they like stickers very much. Thus I added various stickers on the page. Meanwhile, I design mascot and products for Smart Campus in order to make Smart Campus indeed integrated into students’ life.

I realized that interaction design is no longer enough to build a system, product or application that is only functional or efficient; there is an increasing demand for products that are not only efficient but also have other values, such as being pleasurable to handle and use or even fun or intriguing.