Overview
NYU has over 800 clubs and organizations available to students outside of the classroom. There are also a variety of events taking place on campus every day. Find My Club is an application for NYU students to explore and propose new student organizations and events. The goal is to make it easier for students to find their best fit.
Duration
2 weeks
My Role
UX Designer
Reflections on Current Solutions
Before we were going to "pack" all the content and move it from the websites to the new application, I proposed that we could use this chance to declutter and decide what we wanted to keep and what to give up. We went through the different functionalities as well as the general architecture across the current sites. Through the process, we discovered some usability problems and pertinent pain points.
⚠️ Information architecture and layout make it difficult to browse.
NYU Engage is the most frequently visited page to find information about most of the campus clubs. Students can search and browse student groups. However, I couldn't find any sports groups here. After further exploration, I successfully found them in the side nav menu inside a hamburger menu. Similar problems appeared when I tried to find student media groups. Many student groups are not included in the directory, which takes students longer to locate them.
⚠️ The filter feature does not fully serve the student needs for finding the club that match with interest.
The current directory allows students to narrow down results by applying filters. Filters are a great tool to shrink the high volume of content and surface the most relevant results. However, the items are not well categorized. The system allows club organizers to create categories by themself. So there have been 94 categories generated. Many of them overlap with each other in obvious ways. For example, "Political" and "Political Groups" should be combined into one category. Also, it should allow multiple selections because it is likely that students have more than one interest.
Explore
To better understand my assigned challenges, I conducted formative research, including observation research at a campus club fest and separate interviews with 13 participants (10 students and 3 club leaders). It aims to understand students' interests, behaviors and needs that influence their decisions and actions throughout the club's finding journey.
Miscellaneous Ways of Getting Information
There are so many different ways to browse clubs and events. Besides NYU web pages, students also use social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, to find the information they need online. Unlike school club pages, they are also available for prospective students. These social media apps focus on communities and make it easy to invite friends and share information about events. However, not every group has a public social media account or keeps it updated. For some groups, it is used as an alternative for marketing clubs and campus events through the club pages.
S
truggling with Event Management
Some club leaders are struggling with managing their clubs with current platforms. Each club has its way of working members and updates the information about upcoming events. They use mailing lists, social media, Eventbrite, Google doc, etc. Efficiency is their priority for event management tools because they are also students with a busy life.
Open To New Experiences
Some students know which club they want to join. Others are open to all kinds of possibilities. Many students take this as an opportunity to get more involved in campus activities. They want to meet new people, gain some new experiences and move out of their comfort zone.
Sign Up
≠ Join
I learned from club leaders that some students who signed up for their clubs at the beginning of the semester never really show up. Those who attended the kickoff meeting, though, have a bigger chance to become a real member. Many students told me their strategy was to start with many clubs then narrow down their priorities to one or two favorites later.
Define
Using the research as a guideline, I summarized my findings with a problem statement for the user group: NYU students need a more transparent platform that centralizes campus extracurriculars and events. The following attributes are critical:
Centralize information about clubs that help students know the full extent that the NYU community covers
Recreate categories to make it easy for students to browse
Allow students to keep track of the clubs they are interested in for later evaluation
Encourage students to attend meetings before they make decisions
Introduce more meaningful filters to help students with decision-making
Create a share feature to make it easier for students to share the club information
Ideation & Design
I changed the information architecture to centralize the information so that students can find all the clubs and organizations in one place. Also, with the help of my peers, over 800 student clubs were tagged with 17 categories.
Sketches and Prototypes
Explore
The Explore tab helps students to browse or search for clubs. Students who have already heard of a specific organization or had keywords for what they are looking for can directly search for it. Those who are not sure about what they are looking for specifically can browse by category. It is an easy way to find organizations that match their interests.
Design for Encouragement
There are so many events taking place at the NYU campus every day. Some students haven't joined any student groups. But that doesn't mean they should be left behind and isolated. Those events that don't require a membership welcome everyone to join and have a good time. In the "Highlights of the Week" section, such events are displayed on the home page to encourage more engagement.
Centralize and Prioritize
I found many club websites show repetitive info, which overshadows the information that students care about and makes it hard for them to locate important things like the time of the first meeting due to information overload. Attending a few meetings can help students know the organizations better before deciding whether they will commit. Even for students who have joined a club, they sometimes forget to attend meetings easily. That is why I highlighted the time of "Upcoming Events" and put it in a prominent place right after the description. Once a student follows a club, they can go to their profile page to quickly find the club and check the information page.
One of the research findings is that many students also use social media to know clubs better. And most of the student organizations have their social media accounts. It is hard for an NYU app to play the same role as those social media ones. But as a designer, I respect user behaviors. That's why I also added social media information on the club detail page so that students can locate them more easily.
Design for Efficiency
When it comes to deciding whether to attend an event or not, time is always the first thing students consider. Adding filters helps limit the number of events displayed in the event pane or to narrow a search based on a particular time interval.
For students who have a specific goal, such as a topic or a club they are interested in, they can directly find it by searching its name. It can significantly save time.
Testing & Iterations
Evaluation
I was lucky to get a few testings to help me evaluate how easy and intuitive something is to use. Each time I have six volunteer NYU students for brief usability testing. Here is one of the spreadsheets that I used to organize my testing questions and results.
According to the feedback I received from this test, the confusion between following and saving a club is the most noticeable. Three students brought it up. The intention was to separate prospective members from the students who have decided to join. But it caused a lot of confusion. So after discussing it with other team members. I changed the "follow" to "subscribe".
