The ITP & IMA community consists of creative designers, technologists, artists, or people who are an integration of all these identities.
But one thing in common for all members is that we are all makers. Plenty of ideas and projects are born everyday at ITP/IMA.
How do we make it more efficient for people to learn about what their peers have been working on recently?
Social Hub is a web application proposed by previous ITP students as a platform for people to share their works with the community.
At the beginning of 2023, our team resumed this project with user research as a starting point to improve the UX design of the product.
January 2023 - Present
The main goal of Social Hub is to create a space for the community to share their ideas and recent works with people as if they are on social media.
One ask from our manager is to make it into a product that people are willing to come back to very often and will continue to use in the long term.
When our team resumed this project, people who once worked on it had already graduated from the program. Therefore, in order to better understand where we were, our team decided to conduct a user research to help us assess the existing design in the following aspects: (a) product features and (b) information architecture.
We started with general surveys to understand people’s expectations for such products and to assess if existing features matched with their expectations. Knowing our main target users would be the student group, we conducted the survey on the ITP floor.
Our team set up a booth with candies to attract more participants :D
To gain deeper insights on how users feel about the existing website and identify underlying problems with the current design, we conducted more in-depth user interviews and combined them with usability testing.
After finishing the previous steps, we revisited the data we collected from the surveys and the interviews.
We synthesized our analysis into a summary report as well as user personas.
When we were conducting the surveys on the floor, our expected target users will be the students. To our surprise, some faculties and research residents were also very intrigued by the idea of this project. Therefore, we included them when developing our personas. To not eliminate potential users, we also created a persona for incoming students based on hypothesis. But this part is still unvalidated, and thus will be at a lower priority when being considered.
Our main target users are still current students. Based on different needs and purposes, we divided them into three categories: