Mobile App for Student Union Craft Center
🧢 Role: Product Designer (Generalist - Solo Project)
🧠 Demonstrated Skills: Discovery, User Research, Prototyping, Design, Testing & Validation
⏳ Duration: 6 months
Overview
The Student Union Craft Center is a student-run agency within the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The organization provides craft instruction and materials for various disciplines such as leather craft, bookbinding, silkscreen printing, and more. However, for customers and members that are not experts in these various craft areas, knowledge around available materials and tools can be limited. This project is focused on developing a mobile app that can automate their business as well as making their inventory more readily available for viewing and purchasing.
Objectives
Automate business practices and increase access and awareness of the student business and its resources.
My Contributions
During my undergraduate years, I actually worked for the Student Union Craft Center as an area coordinator for 3.5 years. Being a student run agency with limited resources, many of the business practices were manual - from making sales to renting out tools. This also meant that tracking business growth and marketing was limited. I have prototyped an all-inclusive application that will provide back-end data to staff, as well as a fluid user experience for customers and members of the Student Union Craft Center.
Getting Started
Uncovering Retention Rates
When I think of the Craft Center, the first thing that comes to mind is the people - the community that make the Craft Center what it is. One of the main problems that the Craft Center was having was membership retention. How visible was the Craft Center & how many student were engaged?
The Craft Center is usually only able to acquire 600-1000 new memberships every semester, and while other contextual factors have impacted that initial sign-up rate, the retention remains a constant issue. Being able to automate this and bring more exposure to the Craft Center helped me ground my next steps, validate my future solutions, and understand where I can make the most impact.
I started the project out by mapping out a couple of personas - a student employee, the director, and two student members. I got into some specifics of detailing out user journeys to help me find gaps in my own knowledge despite having worked there -.
From there I was able to identify where business and user needs intersected with functional and visual design (form) elements to inform my next steps.
"We have a rich student body at this university and I'd love to see the application become an extension of how inclusive we try to be at the Student Union Craft Center. We have students from low-income families, students with disabilities, as well as international students and more - There are so many amazing ways that the current staff caters to these populations and I'd want that to come to life in this digital experience as well. Humanize it."
Defining Requirements
FORM
INTERNAL BRANDING & ICONOGRAPHY | In 2016, a colleague had drawn minimalist versions of all of the tools the craft center had. I wanted to bring this concept into the app. You will find this line work as a motif throughout the app.A branding uplift was also in order to ensure that students of the larger university could trust the app as they are already accustomed to the university's branding.
UNIVERSITY BRANDING & WHITE SPACE | It can be easy to overuse the UMass maroon - I wanted to keep this app clean, especially with the surplus of information. Similarly, the app had to standout as something that belonged not just to the larger university, but gave the Craft Center its own identity. By maintaining white space, it allows me to keep a clean slate to work off of, incorporating different elements that are uniquely the Craft Center's at the forefront of the user interface.
ACCESSIBILITY | Language support, visual cues, text to speech. The Student Union Craft Center is very focused on being a inclusive spaces. The agency has worked with several other student organizations that support under-represented groups and I wanted to keep those same values in mind when developing different features within the app.
Function
COMMUNITY | CREATING A FORUM TO CONNECT. One of the coolest things I got to witness while working at the Craft Center was the sense of community that craft brought together. Someone who comes in to work on a project every day at 5pm would never get to interact with our AM regulars, but would inspire their fellow night crafters to partake in similar projects. I wanted to bridge the gaps between our members by creating a space where they get to share ideas, tips, and track their own progress and take pride in their work.
INFORMATIVE/MARKETING | The Craft Center manages a lot of events for different student organizations around campus, but often has had trouble distributing streamlined information and updates to their audiences. The app definitely needed to have events and workshops at the forefront of the app design, especially because they are the most profitable sector of the business.
ENGAGEMENT & DATA | At its most basic level, an e-commerce shop will help the business track sales and interest in different products. Having a searchable and organized storefront will help consumers find not only what they are looking for but discover new products. I also thought it might be cool to link the forum and the store together by having users share what products were used in different projects. With measurable engagement metrics on the forum-end, business users can predict inventory needs for popular projects / items.
User Journeys & Prototyping
After outlining the different needs, I created an affinity map that eventually informed how I would then map various user journeys - what tasks are my users trying to accomplish?I narrowed in on one task flow in particular - setting up an account / logging-in. Just getting the student body connected to the app in an accessible way was my main target - and from there they could explore what the Craft Center had to offer at their finger tips.
