top of page
Objective
To create an easy way for Harvard first-years to browse the events of their orientation week called "Opening Days," through a mobile app.
Research
I remember as a first-year feeling both exceedingly dumb and frustrated with having to carry around a giant brochure filled with Harvard's orientation events. Beyond being a physical nuisance that everyone lost, the paper copy was hard to read and navigate, so I have decided to create a digital design for the Opening Days schedule. This mobile app will enable students to ensure they always have their schedule information with them, and gives them an efficient way of sorting through the hundreds of orientation events.
After reviewing the Opening Days brochure, I decided that it was most useful to sort the events into 3 categories: by event type, event location (near me), and event time (happening soon). This insures the ability to search for events not only by interest, but also by convenience. This app would make use of Google APIs such as the Google Calendar in order keep track of an individual's events and Google Maps in order to locate certain events.
Here is the user flow chart I came up with based upon my and my peers' experience:
Style Guide
As part of my design research, I experimented with many different colors and font types. I wanted to choose the color palette surrounding Harvard's official color, crimson. I also wanted to create a range that was crisp, clean and modern, as most of the original guide was in monochrome. The fonts that I chose reflect a traditional yet simultaneously contemporary feel, much like Harvard itself.
Prototype
The video below shows a prototype for how my app works. It starts off with the welcome video that would be played upon first opening the app, and continues through the user flow diagrammed above. I designed all of these individual screens in Sketch and created the product flow in InVision.
Some design decisions I considered were:
How to navigate between screens
I included both a back button in the top left and a drop down menu in the top right so that on any given page a user can go to 'Home', 'Campus
Map', or 'My Events.'
How to make the browsing experience enjoyable and readable
I created graphics and incorporated visuals to break up the text so that
the user was not inundated with words.
How to display on each page
I differed the amount of text on a given page depending on how much
information a user needed at that browsing specificity. I utilized different type faces and colors to establish textual hierarchy for different types of information.
I hope you enjoyed my design submission for the Google Design Challenge! I really loved designing a product for a problem rooted in my reality. Please reach out if you have any questions—I kept it brief for your convenience, but if you would like to see the individual screens in more detail, please visit this page.
bottom of page