The Problem in my campus, UC Berkeley 💭

UC Berkeley owns over 1,200 student clubs and organizations, where each club has their own application that students have to fill out to apply to the club that they desire. Many students feel overwhelmed by the club application processes since there is no specific single portal that the students can use to access and do the application in one place. Thus, there are times when the students accidentally delete their application that they save somewhere else (ex: GoogleDocs, Notes).

The problem also exists within the recruiters side. Because of the competitive and numerous applicants that each club has, the recruiters also feel overwhelmed in managing and updating the applicants regarding their application.

Students are stressed with the overwhelming clubs that exist on campus because of the sense of “competitiveness” that overwhelms them.

There is a stereotype among students that if you get into a campus club, you will be guaranteed to get a job later. This “haunts” every UC Berkeley student.

According to Kinbridge Behavioral Health,

Competitive Environment = 37% higher odds of depression and 69% higher odds of anxiety.

Our Client (Convex) and us discussed about a possible solution for this matter. We decided to build a user-friendly and intuitive application portal can help users, which are club applicants and recruiters, to have a smoother experience in applying to clubs and recruiting applicants. Here, Convex helped us with the backend, as a service platform focused on reactivity.

DESGIN PROCESS 1 - STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEW

Since this project is highly involved with the client (Convex), we had a discussion with them on the first stage of our design process. This helped us to gather any information that may be essential in shaping the design process, defining success metrics, and ultimately to meet stakeholder’s expectations. Convex also helped us with the backend, as a service platform focused on reactivity.

Insights that we got from Convex:

• Collaborative system among recruiters (Ashby)

• Ways to take advantage of real-time features

Moreover, we had a weekly meeting with Convex, so that the things we had been doing are aligned with their visions.

After knowing the direction of the project, specifically design, I began to conduct User Research to deep dive more towards the real-life issues that the students and club recruiters currently experienced. I did an interview with 10 people from two different groups: Applicants and Recruiters.

After doing the research, I gathered the insights by affinity mapping.

Then, I focused on generating the main insights from the research synthesis.

From here, we then developed some possible opportunities to solve these problems.

“I have to go back and forth to see the questions or the alternative way is to open a google docs document, copy paste the questions and type the answers, then copy paste the answers to the google form/airtable”

- Interviewee (Applicant)

How might we provide a simpler and smoother experience in applying to clubs and recruiting applicants?

I constructed a user flow to see the path that the users will take to reach their goal with Roommie. After finishing the user flow, I analyzed how many screens are needed for each step and began to make some sketches. From there, I began to do some sketching where I then developed them into Low-Fi wireframes.

Here are some of the Low-Fi designs that I made from the development of my sketching:

After knowing which direction of the design, I constructed the User Flow so that it can be easier for me and the developers to know the goal of our users in using this app, and also the ways that the users can do to reach the goal.

Final Designs 🎉

After 60+ wireframes, I am finally satisfied with the MVPs. Nonetheless, we still did a testing to see if the products are matched with user needs and our goals.

For the applicants:

Choosing clubs…

DESIGN SYSTEM + COMPONENTS

CONCLUSIONS + REFLECTIONS