An app that facilitates conversations and connections among individuals.

Loop is a mobile app solution that strives to combat loneliness and improve mental health through facilitating conversations and connections among individuals. Loop follows a social networking app model, helping users identify and connect over shared interests at any given institution such as a university.

TEAM

Hannah Chan, Kara Sawamura, Madison Detwiler, Ben Stephan

TIMELINE

24 Hours

TOOLS

Figma, FigJam, Illustrator

ROLE

User Research, UX Design, Prototyping

• INITIAL PROBLEM DISCOVERY

Cal Poly’s students are currently lacking a centralized platform where they can access information about the university’s organizations. Students have to refer to multiple platforms/channels (such as the Cal Poly ASI app, social media, the Cal Poly website, and individual club sites) in order to gather information on university-affiliated organizations. This requires extra efforts when it comes to students discovering organizations to join and connecting with others who share the same interests, and may in turn discourage students.

Students involved in on-campus organizations currently use a combination of apps to stay informed and connected. This often deters students from joining more clubs as it requires more effort to both find clubs that align with their interests and to maintain memberships.

• UXR

We asked Cal Poly students about their experience with finding clubs/organizations to join.

We explored our problem areas with user interviews. Some key questions include:

  • How do decide on which on-campus clubs/organizations to join?

  • Did you feel like you had sufficient information on Cal Poly’s clubs/organizations before making your decisions?

  • What do you hope to gain from joining your particular clubs/organizations?

Of 15 user interviewees, 73.3% said they were dissatisfied with the current process for finding clubs/organizations to join.

We organized our data points into an affinity map and found a few key insights which we then narrowed down to four…

01 Need for personalization

02 Easy exploration

03 Need for segmentation

04 Desire for sense of community

Students want a personalized app that caters to their interests and aids with personal organization.

We found that students gravitate towards apps that mimic social media in the sense that information on all organizations is easily accessible.

Users want segmented information based on their interests (organization type - clubs, athletic, religious, greek life, etc.)

Users felt they could benefit from a centralized app where communication with other organization members can take place, making connecting with others easier and less intimidation.

• USER PERSONAS

We created user personas to guide our design process and identify task flows we wanted to solve. My team and I chose to target college students who want to get more involved and are eager to find communities of individuals who have similar interests and goals. 

• SYNTHESIZING RESEARCH

Based on our findings, we came up with this problem statement:

How might we make the club finding/joining process at schools a streamlined, accessible and approachable experience, all while connections within the communities?

• DECISION MAKING

With input from potential users and mentors, we converged on four key features.

  1. Explore page where users can browse all clubs/organizations and see individual profiles for each club

  2. Initial survey to assess user’s interests

  3. Personalization including a user profile

  4. Chat groups for each club/organization

• DESIGNING

A snapshot of mid-fidelity…

As a team we created a process flow that mapped the key features previously identified.

• VISUAL DESIGN

View our prototype on Figma