User Experience Strategy Class – UX Team Member and Data Analyst
An app designed to introduce prospective and current UGA students and their families to everything Athens has to offer.
Project Overview
On this project, my team and I sought to design an app to showcase Athens’ most popular restaurants and most iconic landmarks. Users can filter various restaurants and view them on a map to locate them. We built this project on Figma.
The Problem
As a first-year or prospective student, Athens is an unfamiliar place that can be daunting to explore and learn about. Oftentimes, it can be hard to find restaurants nearby or learn about the history of the various UGA and local landmarks. Our app allows first-year students to become acquainted with the town they now call home and gives prospective students a taste of what their life might be like as a UGA student.
The Solution
Our app easily integrates first-year students into the Athens community by introducing the most famous landmarks and restaurants they can explore with all the new friends they meet here. The filter system enables users to find exactly the restaurant or landmark they want to explore, and the map page easily navigates them there.
Ideation and Planning
To start off creating this project, we organized a Zoom meeting discussing what one of our personas might want out of an exploring Athens app. We identified one of our personas to be a first-year student looking to get acquainted with Athens. We ultimately decided to showcase sights to see and restaurants to visit because Athens isn’t Athens without its historical landmarks, and its various restaurants bring people together. One specific sight we wanted to showcase was the various painted bulldogs located around town, which have their own section on the app. We brainstormed local restaurants and sites to see in Athens, along with the different aspects associated with them. For example, we imagined what information users might be looking for in a restaurant or an Athens landmark. We consolidated our ideas into a FigJam and drew up sketches on paper before translating them into a collaborative Figma prototype.
Prototyping
We decided to organize our app so that users can search for restaurants and sights to see separately and filter the results to find exactly what they’re looking for. The tag system in the search bar allows users to easily identify restaurants within their price range, along with any other notable features such as seating and formality.
Each restaurant and sight has its own individual page with more specific information the user might need, including its address, menu, phone number, and hours. As this was the first page we designed, it set the tone for the rest of the app.
We also decided to create a map page where the user can map themselves from their current location to their desired destination. The Map page can be filtered by restaurants, bulldogs, and sights to see, so users can locate their desired destination.
During our ideation process, we posited that users would like to save the restaurants and landmarks they want to visit. We implemented this idea by creating a bucket list, which allows users to save locations for later when they go out exploring.
Results
Success Metrics
- 3 out of our 4 tests had 100% success rates
- All timed tasks’ geometric means were all under 20 seconds
Using the Microsoft Product Reaction Cards, our users described our app as:
- Organized
- Clean
- Attractive
- Efficient
We also received a lot of feedback that I’d like to integrate into further iterations of the project, such as making the bucket list feature more visible. This project introduced me to all the various functionality features Figma has to offer, where I learned the power of the tool. In the future, I’d like to fully flesh out these features, such as integrating a working keyboard search system and adding more filters and activities to do in Athens.
Samantha Scalzini 