Welcome to Campus Companion!
Campus Companion is a mobile application, designed to make first year students more confident and independent going into university. Students are able to manage their schedule, connect with others, navigate to different locations and browse forums. Campus Companion is a user experience project, aimed at reducing the stress and anxiety of entering university by making everyday things more simple and managing.
Project Goals
Confidence
Allow first year students to feel confident and independent going into university.
Schedule
Allow users to manage their timetable and schedule events so they stay on top of their studies.
Social
Have a social side, encouraging users to connect with a campus guide or make friends around the university.
Key Features:
Connect to Guides
The connect feature allows students to link up with available guides or friends. This guide can then help them with navigation to their destination at university. This is based on user research, as research suggests building numbers are one of the most common pain points amongst students as it can be confusing when finding locations. Once connected, the guide will then meet the student at their location. Students are also able to become a guide to help others out, once they have had experience on the app.
Schedule & Events
The schedule section allows users to import their university timetable to their calender. Additionally users are also able to add their own personal events to their calender so they have all their schedules in one place. Students are then able to export their events and timetables to their maps, where they are able to see the location of their classes in real time.
Companion Forum
The forum allows for students to ask questions and discover new information regarding university lifestyle. This sections allows users to browse different threats by whats trending, most recent or who they are following. Additionally, students are able to search specific threads through the search bar. Students are also able to like, comment and share the thread they are viewing.
Research Methods
Preliminary & Full Interviews
Personas
Scenarios
Experience Map
Prototyping
User Interviews/Testing
Featured Questions
1 . Do you remember have any struggles with the campus navigation?
2 . Do you use any tools to aid you in university making university life more easy?
3 . If so, what troubles do you have with time management and self-discipline
4 . Would you be interested in an app that aids in everyday lifestyle of university?
5 . If this app was developed, what features would you like to see in it?
Research Findings
Navigation Struggles
Students struggled with buildings not being in logical positions; numbers don’t correlate directly with the location. Students also had troubles checking class room-numbers due to their timetables being hard to access on different applications on mobile devices. As a result, students would arrive late to classes
Tools Used
Through the interviews, there were a variety of different applications students had to use to keep up with university and navigation. This included Lost on Campus, Google Maps, , Elsie, Microsoft Planner, Google Calenders and more. This created missed vital information due to forgetting to check all platforms.
Time Management
Students found they were thrown ‘into the deep end’ with large workloads and no skills on how to manage. They found it was an adjustment going back to study after having time off and having all their university information across different apps hindered the time they had to sit down and think.
Mentoring Program
Students found they were discouraged using the mentoring program offered at university as there was a lack of one-on-one communication with the mentors. Students also reported that they would prefer real life communication rather than purely online. The mentoring program can be useful as it gives valuable insights and advice, however it just needs more personalisation and catering to student needs.
View Case Study
A full case study breakdown of the Campus
Companion Application and the working prototype.
Conclusion
This project was to help first year students at university, whether that meant being new from highschool, or a mature age student returning to studies. Therefore, the solution has been designed with a user-focused approached, utilising a mobile application where they can access all their university information in one place. This was designed to have an intuitive and engaging interface, helping to reduce stress and encourage the use of the application
While Campus Companion has successfully addressed the issues students faced at university, further improvements and features can be made in the future, such as further development of the applications prototype and adding a section where students can see their past grades and assignments.
