Budsies

Helping college students form social relationships with other students like them based on their interests without disclosing their identity to the world.

My Role

UX Designer

Year

2022

Duration

3 Months

Team Members

Michael Hayashi (Developer)

Jasper Luong (Developer)

Tran Bao Hoang (UX Researcher)

Tools

Mural, Balsamiq, Figma, React Native

Exploration

Before establishing the problem we wanted to solve, we wanted to explore the area of hybrid collaboration. We concentrated our efforts to ensure we promoted three values in our design:

Participants

We selected participants based on a few factors to understand the domain better:

User Insights

Themes

Anonymity

Collaboration

Engagement

Socialization

Further interviews revealed point of views

We interviewed three more individuals to understand their point of views and brainstormed how might we statements based on them:

Experience Prototype

To confirm our assumptions, we tested the validity of our ideas by designing an experience prototype that resembled a gaming while learning environment:

Validation of our assumption

Concept Video

Problem Statement

Students struggle with meeting new people and socializing amongst others virtually because of the anxiety induced by conventional video conferencing platforms.

Mission Statement

Budsies brings students together while keeping their identities anonymous to facilitate socialization without fear of judgment.

Value Proposition

Find buddies from around the globe

Sketches

Native Mobile Application

Users would enter a chat room from where they could play games, shows and choose avatars.

VR Based Console

Users could enter a chamber where they could leave voice recordings and edit scrolls for others.

Lofi Prototype

After weighing the pros and cons for both interfaces, we decided to design a native mobile application since it was more accessible.

Three Features

Feature 1: Customize the avatar based on your liking

Feature 2: Join a room based on your interests to talk to the people in your room

Feature 3: Watch TV Shows & Play games together

Usability Testing

We tested our initial screens with 5 participants to understand their perspective when using the application. We measured the results by considering the time taken for them to perform a task, the number of clicks and their thoughts as they used the application.

Number of Clicks

Time taken

Medium-fi Prototype

After our usability testing, we made some changes to ensure that we met the design goals of our product. The main changes that we implemented were:

Integrating a more mature theme throughout the interface using more humanistic avatars.

Changing our mobile interface to tablet as most users prefer using tablets to watch shows and games.

Adding a walk-through to familiarise the users who use this for the first time.

Updated Interface

Flow 1: Watch TV Shows & Play games together

Flow 2: Join a room based on your interests to talk to the people in your room

Flow 3: Customize the avatar based on your liking

Hi-Fi Prototype Demo

Expo Day

We demonstrated our idea on the expo in front of judges from Meta and won an award for the best demo!

Learnings & Next Steps

Continue our learning experience after Budsies by further testing it and deploying it on the App Store.

We learned that it was critical to gather feedback from our users for the prototype and further testing would reveal more insights that could be incorporated.

Currently, our prototype does not have voice embedded and future work could help incorporating that for a better user experience.

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