Researcher
UI Design
Project Management
Atomic Design
Marketing
Through our mobile app, our team aims to address the rising social justice issue of literary censorship in the public school system. With the goal to enable students to take control of their own education….
We were tasked to create either a desktop or mobile application that would advocate for a social justice issue, that encourages or provides the opportunity for equity in an economic, political, or social issues.
The current wave of book banning in schools across America has censored the ideas of countless great authors and withheld valuable knowledge from whole generations of students. In addition to this, there is a lack of existing products and services that provide students with access to these books and has created a void where this knowledge threatens to become lost forever.
Our solution will address this gap by implementing a system that connects students with resources to locate and become informed on banned books stemming from a wide range of categories.
We believe we can increase knowledge and awareness on current book bannings by creating a more adept student body, armed with the resources necessary to gain access to information as well as multiple avenues by which to obtain the books in question.
Primary Audience: Students and children between the middle and high school age who want to enable themselves to be more educated, or are simply curious about current matters.
Secondary Audience: Those surrounded by the students on a daily and impact their learning such as teachers, faculty, and parents of students.
Due to our limited time constraints, we used the Lean UX Brainstorming method in order to figure out our order of operations, and lay a foundation for what we were tackling. This included our problem statement, target audience, desired outcomes and benefits, and our solutions to the problem at hand.
Getting to know our topic better, we individually researched a plethora of information on why books were being banned, where, who was banning them and more. As we gathered resources such as articles, we shared ideas with each other, noting which parts sparked the most controversy.
As a team, we created two personas in order to get a better sense of our target audience. The first persona Toby is an older high school student who wants to advocate for their own education, whereas our second persona Kaila is a younger, more naive individual, who wants to educate herself on current matters.
In order to know what types of screens we would need, we began with a proposed user flow based on each persona’s goals and frustrations. This laid out what kinds of screens we would need, as well as what kind of information, visuals, and more we would need.
After creating the user flows and personas as a team, I then took charge of creating the Information Architecture, which would lay out the skeleton for our application. Connecting screens and ideas together in order to create a better flow when using our application.
We created a simplified journey map to highlight the pain points of users, in order to note where our app could provide the greatest impact. This also enabled us to focus on the user’s journey and experience, rather than creating an application for selfish reasons.
We researched the current state of the market regarding products that would be similar to ours, however the available resources was very sparse and region specific (state/school district). The two main takeaways we gained from this was:
We didn’t have the time available to create proper iterations, so we decided to divide and conquer. Half of us began sketching ideas, while the other half of us continued research and gathering other information that we would later utilize. As our became more finished, they evolved into low-fidelity wireframes that would give us a sense of layout and feel for our product.
We based our color palette off of neon lights that are often displayed in speakeasies, and correlated the idea of our app to the idea of a retro speakeasy and the illicit ideas often discussed at those establishments.
I took the role of componentization, creating each of the components we would utilize within the prototype, in addition to micro-animations, and checking the continuity and consistency between screens.
Out of the 150 team sign ups, and after 2 days of designing, we made it to the top 10 teams that would then present our ideas to a panel of judges. We were given an hour to create a 10 minute pitch to them, showcasing our application and some of the user experience research and ideas behind it.
From here, we were put into a top 5 category to be judged further, where we made the top 3 teams. We went up again many very formidable and well known California colleges such as UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Riverside, and Rice University from Houston, Texas.
We were crowned one of three finalists that would then be showcased on UCI's website, LinkedIn, and Instagram, which you can find below.
Below are links to UCI's social media posts that our team 'Sigma Figma Chi' has been featured on, including Instagram, LinkedIn, and their Design-a-thon's Event page.
We believe we can implement and/or increase the digital adoption among healthcare workers who use paper or personal computer for charting as part of their job by making the process more efficient by streamlining the patient check-in process of inputting initial information such as vitals.
To view any of the brainstorming, design, or prototyping process, you can click on the embedded files below.
