Unibuzz: helping first-years socially adjust in college
Unibuzz is a b2c social media app with an exclusive campus community for first-years to anonymously share stories, experiences, and challenges as college students. They face this new experience; where everything changes, they feel out of place and bottle things up, which might affect their social and academic life. This is a final project at Apple Developer Academy in Jakarta.
2022
Social media
Macro challenge of Apple Developer Academy
Objective
We aim to help first-years have a platform to express their thoughts and share information as they transition into college.
Target users
First-year college students, especially those who struggle to adjust.
Roles
Research, ideation, user flow, IA, UI, prototype, moderation, concept & usability testing, branding.
Team
I worked as the Lead designer here with Disty as the designer, Iona as the product manager, and Kevin, Farhan, Hada as the coders.
100%
successful tasks from 6 users for our qualitative UT for all the significant flows
82
score for Screen Usability Score (SCUS) from Maze for creating a post flow.
Using gamification to spark interactions for unibuzz
Working with internal and external motivations
We get that extrinsic motivation without good internal motivation wouldn’t work. But since users already have the internal motivations (i.e., expressing their thoughts), we worked on the extrinsic motivations (i.e., being able to change their pseudo names, create channels, and more)
Using rewards to keep the Hive well and alive
We encourage our users to collect honey drops. They can change their pseudo name if their honey jar is complete (20 drops of honey). With their profile picture just colour and two letters, changing their pseudo name is one of the few ways to express themselves.
Reaching the goal: engaging and crowded Hive
The main objective of this gamification is to create a timeline (Hive) where users engage in it and interact with each other. We can reach this goal by giving them honey drops every time they give upvotes and comments, creating buzz, and creating words that get upvoted.
Retrospective
This project was pivotal because it taught me the most dangerous thing as a designer and researcher: bias.
Bias can lurk from within yourself, your team, and even your users. What revealed these biases is receiving feedback from our mentors and our users early on.
But in the end, we managed to pivot and change our point of view when looking at our problem. We tested the design and received 100% successful tasks from 6 users for our qualitative usability testing for all the significant flows.
