1. Problem Space
For college students, it’s difficult adjusting to and balancing adulting and college.
Coming into college and their adulthood, students are often on their own for the first time in their life and face a drastic increase in individual responsibilities. Standard tasks such as moving apartments, grabbing food and supplies, or taking care of a pet can be made complicated if students don't have a car or travel often.
‍
We explored the problem space more by interviewing real students. To understand pain points, we surveyed 35 students on college-specific chores they've needed another hand to help with. The 6 most common errands that students have needed outside help to complete with are shown below:
Through interviews, we also found that certain student demographics may not have the resources, time, or community support to get their errands done in a convenient or efficient manner. Specifically, freshmen, international students, and out-of-state students come into a new environment and may struggle to find help.
"“As an international student in a new country who doesn’t know anyone well yet, it’s sometimes hard to find someone who can help [with errands].”
“I have difficulty with any task that requires transportation, because I don’t have a car at university. Things like carrying a lot of groceries, moving in, or storing my items over the summer. I always have to ask around and hope a friend can help me with them.”
Our competitive analysis of existing applications showed us that other existing task-related apps were either too broad or general.
‍
3. Wireframing, Prototyping, and APIs
A live prototype of our wireframes can be found
here.
We brainstormed early screens of what features and functions our app should include. For example, I created a preliminary app example called NexTask, below, with a very basic onboarding and a three page menu layout including a marketplace, post form, and profile.
‍
We then identified which features to prioritize. For example, from the brainstorming above, we took and iterated upon the idea of adding tags to each errand in order to easily find ones relevant to the user. From other brainstorming wireframes we decided upon ideas like having a search bar, and being able to view the errands you've posted and picked up in your profile.
After developing a set of low-fidelity wireframes, we conducted 5 user tests to see what features users thought were the most useful and which they liked. From those, we learned that the most important aspects of the app was that we needed to refine was the terminology used (ex: “request”, “expired”, “market”, etc.) for user clarity, as well as refine the flow for picking up an errand (i.e. the difference between the “contact poster” and “pick up” buttons). Each piece of feedback, if it was determined to be relevant to our MVP, was then used to guide consolidation for high-fidelity wireframes.
‍
With these insights, we developed hi-fi wireframes:
Using these wireframes, we:
‍
1. Built an interactive prototype which you can explore
here.
2. Tested users on the prototype
3. Tested our information flow with our APIs, which we then set up in Firebase and Apple.
We also explored smaller changes to our app's visual identity, and UIÂ indications to personalize the app experience. For example, after exploring ways to visually differentiate the errand tags without making the tags too distracting, we chose to implement our tag system with emojis in the real application. Â