College Tour App
- Jaiden Shortt
- Oct 21
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 23
Digital Corps UX Training
December 2024
All students hired at the Digital Corps have a semester of training, for user experience our training involves doing every step of our UX process from start to finish by ourselves. For my training I created this hypothetical app that allows the user to take a virtual tour of a college, schedule an in person tour, earn badges for exploring the college on in person tours, and earn prizes for badge completion. Our UX process includes research, problem & success statements, high-level & detailed requirements, personas, empathy maps, sitemaps/workflows, Figma prototyping, and usability/QA testing. Since my training I've explored recreating this prototype in Axure, despite never finishing my Axure prototype I did enjoy exploring different prototyping services and plan to continue dabbling in Axure.
Our process stars with researching the pain points of prospective college students, exploring what options for virtual tours already exist, and looking at what possible features would improve college tour experience.
From this research I created this document which defines the problem, prospective students who unable to attend in person tours deserve comprehensive online tours AND prospective students who can take in person tours often feel disengaged.
My solution to this problem was an application that allowed a user to either take an interactive virtual tour or earn badges during in person tours, both increasing engagement between colleges and prospective students as well as making information more accessible for prospective college students.
Based on this problem statement solution, I defined what success would look like with both a qualitative result of improved user satisfaction as well as a quantitative result of increased interest and applications for universities using the service.
Lastly, I used all of the previous research to formulate this list of high level requirements detailing the functionalities this app should possess: an interactive map and landmarks, scheduling options, and a badge system.
After researching I started creating personas: one for the most common user, prospective students, one for university admissions users, the people who would need to upload their colleges info, and one for a teacher who would likely be advertising the app to her high school students.
After submitting this in my training I received the feedback that the teachers persona should be swapped for a different direct user (prospective student) persona to consider different users.
These personas allowed me to put myself in the shoes of these users (and someone external impacted by this app) and create empathy maps for all 3 personas. In these empathy maps I explored who these people were, what commitments they had, what they are seeing, hearing, doing, saying in their day to day lives, and how they think and feel.
After fulling understanding the users point of view, pain points, and desires, we can begin to create detailed requirements. To allow the user to select a college the app needed to provide a method to search and be recommended colleges. To allow the user take a digital tour the app needed to provide a method to follow a tour checklist, display an interactive map, interact with landmarks, and access multimedia information. To allow the user to earn badges for in person tours the app needed to provide a method to log in, view badges and rules, submit photos to prove completion, and earn rewards for badge completion.
Click to view detailed requirements
To better organize these requirements I created a sitemap and a work flow, these allowed me to better organize my thoughts and the features of the app as well as allowing me to consider the experience of a specific functionality (more specifically the process of both in person and virtual tours).
And finally, the prototype, the culmination of all my work. This was the first time I used Figma, and the first time I created a digital prototype (and thus the first time I created a clickable prototype). This experience taught me most of what I know about Figma and had the extra challenge of figuring out how to get the clickable prototype to behave how I deemed the app needed to behave. While I am incredibly proud of the state the prototype ended up being there were several functionalities I did not get implement, most notably I really wanted to make the text fields ally accept text, however, in order to do this in Figma it requires using variables and way more complex features I couldn't find modern tutorials for. Additionally some functions like the hamburger menu I "hard coded," I've since learned how to do hamburger menus, drop downs, and popups through Figma without "hard coding."
After creating my clickable prototype we moved on to the testing phase, during this testing I performed both usability testing as well as quality assurance testing.
For my usability testing I performed 3 formal tests with other Digital Corps employees them to complete a series of tasks, after they completed the tasks I recorded how long they took to complete the task, how difficult they felt the task was on a scale from 1-5, and any thoughts or comments they made while doing the task or after doing the task. After receiving these results I found the average time on task and difficulty across all 3 participants, this allowed me to examine which tasks where more difficult based on lengthy attempts and difficulty rating. The results of these tests showed that while the prototype was generally usable there were minor language issues which left the users in the dark about what certain options were actually doing.
Click to view usability testing document
For QA testing I personally evaluated if I actually implemented all of the detailed requirements I had made earlier and if these things were working how they should. Through this I did find a few requirements I had not fully met and made notes on how I would iterate to implement the forgotten requirements.
Click to view QA testing document