Duration
Tools
Team
Context + Challenge
As my senior capstone project, this project has provided an incredible experience of helping an app grow from just an idea to a fully fleshed out mobile application. Posed with the opportunity to choose any kind of digital product to design and develop, we chose to create a solution to help people with busy schedules to efficiently and easily schedule time with their friends.
My Role - UX Designer
Led UX design - Created app wireframes and prototypes by using a component-based design system established by myself and the other UX designer on the team
Supported user research - Conducted user interviews and usability testing to test features of our prototype and identify pain points and opportunities
Developed a brand identity - Founded a core brand identity (including color scheme, iconography, logo, standardized design practices) and created marketing materials to represent the team and Juncture brand
Problems Juncture addresses
The hardest part of planning a social event always tends to be finding a common time where everyone can attend. The scheduling platforms already on the market do an inadequate job of resolving this problem, often being more business focused or fail to provide support for the users’ existing calendar platform. Additionally, a lot of event planning happens in group chats, which tend to be unreliable at best.
Research Phase
Our initial research phase to help inform us of our app features and requirements consisted of user interviews, surveys/questionnaires, market research (of apps that have scheduling tools like When2Meet, Outlook calendar, and HowBout), a SWOT analysis, an affinity diagram, creating user personas, and making journey maps for the user personas. Understanding our user base and what features our app needed to have was essential prior to designing.
Sketches
Below are a few sketches I did to visualize my initial ideas for the app. This includes a general layout for the calendar, what content is featured on the event details page, what a profile page could look like, and a high-level flow for viewing event albums.
Lo-Fi Prototype
Establish our core pages: Calendar (also the homepage), Event Details, Notifications, and Memories and their layouts
Identify key content and information to be highlighted on the event details page
Introduce the event creation process where users can compare calendar availability
Lo-Fi Prototype
After concluding usability testing for our lo-fi prototype, we had a few key notes that we carried into our design process for the mid-fi prototype. The first issue was we had to simplify the visual design of the time selection feature – many users found difficulty differentiating when someone was available or unavailable. Next, we had to reconsider the placement of our notifications inbox and entertain the possibility of integrating it as its own page in the navbar. Another major logistic was solidifying the type of information to include in the event details page – when it came to including either comments, notes, or both, we decided it would be best to include both so the event itself can have a description and event invitees can have discussions about the event in the comments. From our surveys and initial research, we found that communication around planning an event can become hectic and convoluted when it happens in group chats, so having a place in the app for communication would be a valuable feature.
Mid-Fi Prototype
Explore a more clear and easy to understand way to present a time selection feature to find the best time for an event
Include more relevant and impactful content into event invitations such as an indicator of if a user is available for a proposed event
Integrate colors and imagery to explore visual design and balance
Mid-Fi Prototype
Our second major usability testing phase concluded with the mid-fi prototype, where we focused on testing different calendar views, the event creation process, and the user flow of the memories page and clicking into an event album. We introduced a page in the event creation flow where users can see the availability of all invitees after setting a time range. After testing, we realized we were at a crucial point in our design process – our core feature, which is supposed to be the highlight of how easy event planning can be with Juncture, was getting lost in our UI and was still a bit difficult for our testing subjects to understand and get the hang of it. We were also at a point where we needed to strengthen our UI structure and had to revisit content organization (spacing, typography combinations, visual elements and guidelines) to make the app feel more cohesive and comprehensive at a glance.
Design System
Our design system includes component and style libraries with our calendar colors (along with their low opacity and text color counterparts), typography, iconography, radius and border styles, logo and usage guidelines and multiple components with variants which are used throughout the app.
Hi-Fi Prototype
Finalize a comprehensive version of our time selection feature which reflects our branding and is easy for users to use
Restructure and redesign the invitations page to have an organized list of clean and easy-to-read invitations
Solidify the app's visual standards and apply them throughout all pages and features
Create all other pages outside of the main user flow, including the login page and profile page
The foundation of Juncture is a calendar that holds both your Juncture events and your personal Google calendar. We've included the ability to sync your Google calendar account to help reflect an accurate representation of when you are busy, which helps the time selection feature suggest more viable times for you and your friends.
The calendar has three views: single view, three day view, and month view for different viewing experiences. Juncture events reflect your RSVP status and show the most vital information at a glance – including what the event is, who's going, and when it will be.
What makes Juncture special is the time selection feature. We wanted to make finding the perfect time for a hangout with friends as easy as possible, and to do this we combined a few different solutions. After choosing which people are invited to the event, Juncture analyzes everyone's availability and shows a few suggested times. The results can be filtered by dates and time range and show how many people are available.
If you would rather prefer to manually look through everyone's availability, you can do so by toggling to the calendar view and perusing through it for a visual reference.
Event invitations
Event invitations can be accessed through both the calendar and the invitations tab in the notifications page. Invitations on the notifications page are sorted into 'Needs response', 'Responded', and 'Your past events' and show the vital information – what the event is, date and time, event owner, and your availability. The expanded invitation allows you to update your RSVP and shows you who's going, any notes from the event owner, the photo album, and a comments section for any discussion about the event.
Our research found that most people value sharing and preserving memories. We created a page where Juncture events automatically have a photo album for everyone to upload photos to. A reminder to add photos to the latest hangout sits at the top to encourage every attendee to participate in photo sharing. Photos can be downloaded from the album, and event attendees can type comments to photos for interactive engagement.
Working on this project from start to finish over an entire school year was incredibly fulfilling and was worth the challenge. Developing Juncture as a UX designer has taught me how important it is to ask right questions to find what would be most valuable to the users we're designing for, and how to make digital experiences easy to use and understand.
I'm immensely grateful to have been able to work with a passionate and diligent team throughout the entire process. Whether it was brainstorming ideas for our app, handing off designs to the development members, practicing our final presentation over and over again, or chatting after meetings, I've had an amazing time collaborating with this team and seeing our project grow.