Working with 7 devs over the summer to develop 2 end-to-end platforms streamlining data analysis and club exploration

Organization involvement is one of the pillars of university experience. Even though a majority of students want to get more involved, common barriers-to-entry such as complex club discovery and academic pressure discourage students from getting involved.

We wanted to experiment with the possibility of combining something familiar while encouraging more involvement. This is what me and 7 other UCI students decided to explore gamification. Can we apply leverage this in a healthy way to improve a core aspect of a student’s experience?

University clubs are decentralized, inconsistent, and frustrating to navigate

These are common problems that college students around the US are experiencing. Clubs are a crucial part of university life for most students, both as a means to meet people and to advance one’s career. However, most clubs at UCI use incompatible systems: from google forms to physical sign-in sheets. Students are having trouble managing all these logistics across multiple clubs.

After digging deeper into the student life of other campuses, we found that public universities have a LOT of clubs (UCLA has over 1200!) Students on reddit and discord (popular social media platforms for uni students) expressed hesitation to participate in new clubs due to inflexible schedules and lack of alignment with their career ambitions. Do UCI students experience the same frustrations?

Why do we need this? Because the pipeline is messy...

The current user flow between clubs and students isn’t consistent across clubs and leverages a lot of external softwares that increases the BTE to participating in these clubs.

To address the issue of lacking a centralized access point for club activities, I mapped out the direct flow between students and clubs. I also included the main input items (feedback and demographic data) that were not well centralized in clubs.

A direct link between clubs <> students

We created 2 different platforms: a mobile app for students to discover events and leave reviews and a centralized web-based dashboard for clubs to track data about users. Our goal was to directly link clubs and students without sacrificing accessibility and usability

We talked to 30+ UCI students... and they’re frustrated.

Through our personal connections, we received feedback from students through 24 user surveys, 4 user interviews, and several coffee chats through discord servers, instagram, and linkedin (to target a vast variety of students). We also personally talked to executive members of clubs to understand their pain points.

We surveyed 24 UCI students. Here were the patterns.

To dig deeper into root cause and patterns of frustrations across UCI students, I worked with my team to craft a research protocol shipped to students to UCI discord channels and personal connections to club executives.

We interviewed 4 students

After scheduling interviews with 4 UCI students, here are the common patterns of behavior we found.

frustrated by: complexity of current systems forcing them to do more work than necessary -> higher user drop-off
motivated by: building social connections and career-boosting opportunities