UIUX Designer
KampusPadi
Overview
Role: UI/UX Designer
Context: Social Web Application
Duration: November /2021 - December /2021
Problem Statement
It's everything except surprising that African students really persevere through regret and depression due to the pressure from their lecturers, co-students and parents. According to an article on Europe PMC, 65% of tertiary students in Nigeria experience depression due to several sociodemographic factors. I was entrusted by a leading body of NGOs (Mental Aware Nigeria Initiative and Stand to rape initiative) to provide an informal community to Nigeria students (Africa) which will function like Instagram or Facebook yet with the obligation of assisting with detailing issues happening within their separate colleges and furthermore also provide an avenue where students will be able to message experts from these NGOs (MANI and SRI) covertly.
Solution
This is a huge task due to the fact that the Nigerian government, unlike Germany, do not guarantee to save data and freedom of speech. I had to think about the best way to approach this problem. I sorted it out with other team members and got lots of advice from them. To ensure that information given during my research are true, I assured my user group on their data will be safe and deleted immediately after the project is completed. I even signed an NDA agreement with them. I also had to study the Nigerian constitution regarding social media and data usage.
My Role
I worked on all the phases of this project. Usability tests, visual designs, user research and design. I had the help of my team members whose contribution was highly appreciated.
Design Process
Empathize with users (Research) - Define the problem - Ideate solutions - Prototyping - Testing
Empathize with users (Research)
The user experience and data protection were my main focus during this course of this project. I directed user interviews. Over 200 students were enrolled. I had to go for a large number due to the population of Nigerian students The participant's ages range from 16 to 35 years as master students were included in the research. A questionnaire of 10 questions was rolled out and results were gathered using google analytics.
Pain Points
I was able to identify various pain points and find solutions to them. I created my user persona, empathy map, Information architecture, and user flow. I proceeded from this point to carry my product owners along as I have some serious issues going on with the task.
Low fidelity wireframes
Just like every user-centred designer, I started introducing my solution by designing a low-fidelity wireframe. Some samples can be found in the image below. Taking my user persona into consideration, I must confess that designing this LO-FI was not easy for my team and me. On several occasions, we had to request the advice of our senior colleagues. We manage through this stage with serval meetings with the NGOs and product managers.
High fidelity wireframe
Having discussed the LO-FI with the NGOs and product owners, my team and me move to the next phase. The usability test was not performed on the LO-FI because of the number of screens that needed to be designed and time wasn't our friend anymore. The HI-Fi and prototyping was my favourite session of the project. I was excited because I was once a Nigerian student and I know the level at which the solution I have created will help future generations. At this stage, I decided to distribute the screens to be designed among each team member. I designed the Onboarding, Home(for both existing and new users), Student profile, change password, chat page, resources, 404 error, verification screen, and news page screens. Other elements designed by me include the logo, icons and style guide.
Usability Test
At this junction, we were running out of time and we needed to meet the scheduled time frame to enable the developers to begin their phase of the project. We had to conduct the services of a usability testing centre in Nigeria. This was supervised by the product managers as we only got a beautiful remark after the project was presented to the board of NGOs.
Other minor projects I designed can be found in the following links
NB: These are the details needed to access the pages
Username: michaela@pellsea.com
Password: 123456
