Background
The Sproul Club project aimed to create a centralized platform for students to discover and connect with clubs at UC Berkeley. As a Product Designer, I played a key role in designing the club pages and discovery cards, crucial elements for user engagement and club visibility. This project spanned [mention the timeframe, e.g., 6 months from initial concept to beta launch and iteration]. My focus was on creating intuitive and visually appealing interfaces that facilitated seamless club discovery and interaction, contributing to a significant increase in user engagement.
User Research
I joined the team post the Beta launch, which didn’t involve any product designers and was a bare bones set up to help the team demo and showcase the desired functionality. With the addition of product designers, we conducted student surveys on campus to receive feedback on the usefulness of our features. The survey had 105 responses.
Project Summary
Team: 2 project managers + 4 designers +
6 developers
Timeline: 6 Months
Skills
UI/UX Design
Frontend Engineering
Prototyping
My Role
As the Product Designer, I was responsible for the end-to-end design process of the club pages and home page club cards. My responsibilities included:
Conducting user interviews and surveys to understand student needs and pain points related to club discovery.
Iterating on card designs based on user feedback and best practices.
Creating low-fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity mockups for club pages and cards.
Developing interactive prototypes in Figma for user testing and stakeholder review.
Collaborating with club administrators to gather feedback and ensure accurate representation of club information.
Analyzing user data to optimize design decisions and improve user engagement.
Sproul.club
The Challenges
The Solution
The COVID-19 pandemic made it more difficult for Berkeley students to find campus clubs to join and pertinent recruitment information, which ultimately limits their student experience.
We then mind mapped the detailed responses and suggestions from the survey to prioritize revisions needed for the club page.
With the goal of sproul.club being the one stop shop for club recruitment at UC Berkeley and the research completed, we narrowed down on a few features we decided to prioritize for the first launch.
User Feedback
We actively sought feedback from students and club administrators throughout the design process. We incorporated their feedback to refine the designs and ensure they met user needs. This resulted in us removing extraneous cards, including more graphics and photography, and simplifying the tabloid view to avoid information overload.
We also worked with our engineers to prioritize solutions that reduce eng debt and unnecessary complexity. This resulted in us removing arrows in the Application Tracker kanban board in favor of a more direct drag and drop option. We also leveraged familiar UIs and created a calendar view that replaced the timeline view.
Takeaways
This was a very special project for me to work on, both from the perspective of a student looking to understand the club landscape in UC Berkeley as well as an executive leader in a club hoping to better market to perspective members on campus. Collaborating with a cross-functional team through the entire product lifecycle was an invaluable learning experience. Our shared student experiences navigating campus clubs fostered exceptionally smooth communication and understanding within the team.
Impact and Results
Reflection
Areas of Improvement
We were a team that worked quickly with multiple sprint cycles but not much documentation of the process. This resulted in multiple iterations of mocks, graphics, and user studies that were only recapped through weekly meeting notes and presentations. If we had dedicated effort into organizing explicit documentation, we could’ve insured smoother handoff to the next designers.