Tech Terps+ App Design
UI/UX, App Design
As part of a semester-long project for an introduction to UX course, my team and I designed a fictional mobile app called Tech Terps+ that aims to better organize and highlight tech and computing-related student organizations at the University of Maryland.
View the prototype here 🡵
Timeline: August-December 2021
Role: Student, UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma
The Problem
The University of Maryland’s current platform for centralizing student organizations, Terplink, is difficult to navigate and inefficiently organized, especially when managing over 600 organizations. It lacks clear categorization, intuitive filters, and tailored discovery tools, making it hard for students to find and engage with relevant clubs.
This issue is especially evident for students in tech and computing-related majors, where many organizations exist but may be difficult to locate or differentiate within the system.
The Solution
A user-friendly mobile app for discovering and organizing tech and computing-related student organizations.
The Opportunity
While exploring strategic opportunities at the University of Maryland (UMD), we drew from our shared interests and involvement in tech and computing to identify a key need: improving how students interested in these fields discover and engage with relevant organizations.
Understanding Our Audience
Our primary audience for Tech Terps+ were students who were interested in areas of tech and computing.
We conducted interviews with 2 UMD students who shared such interests. The questions mainly revolved around their interests, how they get involved on campus through various means, and how they felt about using Terplink to find prospective organizations to join.
Based off our interviews, we created user personas with two target audiences, new and current UMD students, both with core needs of having a streamlined hub to search for prospective organizations to join and manage their involvements.
Interview insights were also organized in an affinity diagram.
Some key findings:
Value of having personalization in the discovery and management of current and prospective organizations to join
Pain points in navigating Terplink stem from ineffective filters and overwhelming challenges of finding relevant organizations
Calendar and productivity-like features were useful when managing extracurricular schedules
Developing the Ideas
Taking what we gathered from our research, we identified 3 goals that would define the soon-to-be Tech Terps+ app.
Low-Fidelity
We wanted the app to balance robust features with clear organization and simplicity.
Branding
Tech Terps+ comes from our mission to connect UMD students—Terps—to the campus’s tech and computing community.
We wanted to convey freshness and friendliness, emotions that reflect our brand identity and invite students to feel welcomed into campus extracurricular life.
High Fidelity
User Testing
We then had several UMD students involved in tech and computing test our high-fidelity prototype to determine whether the app served its purpose in an easy and efficient way, while also identifying areas for improvement.
Our testers found our app easy to use, visually appealing, and appreciated the app’s focus on tech and computing-related extracurriculars.
Reflections
This project involved multiple stages, from user research and ideation to prototyping and testing. Our success in developing a prospective mobile app for UMD students was driven by working in a communicative, responsible team. Transforming an initial idea into a tangible product was a rewarding process.
Future iterations could focus on:
Increasing the visibility and usability of search filters
Improving clarity for toggling between “All Events” and “My Events” in the calendar
Expanding features for organization management
Enhanced focus on accessibility