Redesigning The Fairs App
Redesigning the Fairs App to Enhance Students’ Career Fair Experience
Redesigned the Fairs App to enhance students’ career fair experience.
Individual Project | Spring 2020
UX Research, UX Design, UI Design, Prototyping
Overview
What is The Fairs App?
It is an application that primarily helps users to access fair information and to narrow down what specific exhibitors they may want to visit at the fair.
Bentley University has been offering this app to students to use for the career fairs that holds every spring and fall.
Problems and Challenges
There are usually more than a hundred companies that will attend a career fair, which leads to a tremendous amount of information loaded in the app for students to access in their journey of attending the career fair.
However, the existing app presents too much unnecessary information in a dense and clustered way that causes stress and information overload to the users.
Some critical event information is also not communicated to the users on time; students are not receiving the full benefits of using this app to better prepare themselves for the career fair. Attending the career fair is already quite stressful to students; the original design of the app is not helping to relieve it.
Project Goals
With user research and usability testing, students’ key challenges, tasks, and needs are identified clearly throughout the entire process of attending the career fair (before, during, and after the career fair).
This project aims to reduce stress for students by using an iterated approach and applying design principles to reduce the cognitive load and stress level while increasing the efficiency of use.
Provide design for some innovative functionalities to meet key users’ needs (such as multi-factor filtering, “To-visit” list, notes-adding, and notes and list exporting).
Process
The process includes discovery phase, user research, analysis and synthesize, and design iterations.
User Research
Two parts user research
Users behaviors of attending a career fair
Users perceptions of the Fairs App’s original design
Research Goals
To understand:
Users’ pain-points during the career fair
Task flow of attending a career fair
What is the context of use of the App
What users like about the original design?
What users do not like about the original design?
What functionalities are duplicated and unnecessary?
What functionalities are missing?
Research Methodology
User interview with 8 current Bentley University’s students
3 in-person interviews and 5 Zoom interviews (due to COVID-19 situation)
Interviewees consist both students who just attended an in-person career fair using the Fairs App and students who have never used this App before to ensure unbiased feedback
Think-aloud methodology
Key Findings
Through the user interviews, key and unique challenges and needs that users face at each stage of the career fair attending journey were identified. Users have the need before, during, and after the career fair. The original app design only partially supports the tasks before the career fair and during the career fair.
From the user interviews and testing, all of the participants have issues with the lack of searchability, incomplete filtering functionality, and dense information presented in the app. Eighty percent of the participants found that the duplicated information was confusing and the map functionality was useless. The detailed screen-by-screen annotated user research findings are shown below.
Context
In order to understand factors that may affect usability and identify key opportunities for improvements, the context of use including physical, organizational, and technical environment is captured.
The loud auditory environment and the hot thermal environment of the career fair is one of the key factors to consider when redesigning the app.
Context of use factors adapted from Maguire & Bevan (2002).
User Persona
The persona is created based on actual students interviews with the consideration of unique Career Fair related frustrations (such as interruptions, anxious and nervous feelings etc.)
Task Flow Redesign
The original app only partially support the tasks before the career fair and during the career fair.
Thus, redesigned the user task flow to include before, during, and after the career fair to fulfill users’ needs detailed in the graph below:
Final Prototype
Design Iterations and Justifications
Sketches Iterations
Exploration of different ways to present the Event Information (Home) page through adding a bottom navigation bar for users to access different functions with one click and minimize confusion of the functions.
Exploration of different ways to present the “Basic Event Info” section through adding icons to convey meaning and eliminating duplicated information.
Explorations of different locations and formats of the “Add” button on the company details screen, moving the button from the top of the screen to the bottom and following users’ glancing and scrolling behaviors.
Wireframes Iterations
Different notetaking designs taking consideration of sub-notes vs. bullet points, limited space vs. wide space, and minimal clicks
Layout explorations of the company page’s top section through evaluating the efficiency of white space usage.
Explorations of the layouts of the Employers screen