5Hub
Summary
The Five College Consortium in the Pioneer Valley offers an abundance of academic and social events. Yet, students often need help staying connected to these opportunities due to fragmented communication channels. Multiple platforms — ranging from university apps to social media — serve as primary event sources, but many students miss out simply due to a lack of awareness or unfamiliarity with these channels. The solution our team proposes is 5Hub, a mobile app designed to consolidate all events in the area, making them accessible and discoverable. Through 5Hub, students can search, filter, RSVP, and share events across the Five College system, as well as post their events for wider visibility.
The app aims to bridge the gap between students, their campuses, and the surrounding community, fostering a more connected, engaged, and active student community. In our development process, we focused on creating an intuitive user experience, ensuring that discovering events would be seamless and enjoyable. The app also serves as a platform for event organizers to attract attendees, solving the challenges they face in reaching their target audience. Through user testing and feedback, we aim to refine the app's design, ensuring it meets the needs of students and event organizers alike.
5Hub was our a final team project for CS325: Human-Computer Interaction. My contributions included conducting our primary and secondary research, creating a low-fidelity prototype, building our final prototype in Figma, dividing the group's work, and organizing our materials.
Problem Statement
The Pioneer Valley is home to a variety of academic institutions and thousands of students. Because of this, there is always something happening in the area, whether it is a college-led or student-orchestrated event. However, it is easy for a student to feel lost in such a large community. There can be so much going on that a student does not know where to find an event or activity that resonates with them. At UMass, for example, there are multiple platforms used to advertise events: they can be found on UMass websites and apps, Instagram accounts, Snapchat stories, or simply flyers around campus. If a student is not familiar with one of these mediums, it is easy for them to miss an event that they would have been interested in.
Alternatively, it can feel like there is nothing going on due to unawareness of all of the different resources to find events. A person who does not use social media, for example, is at a disadvantage. The commonly used platforms mentioned often do not include activities outside of UMass in the surrounding areas, causing a detachment between UMass and neighboring colleges and towns. People hosting events geared toward students may also struggle to spread the word. There are countless students wanting to host live performances, interactive demos, community gatherings, or small business promotions as a way to share their skills, educate, inspire, or simply entertain and have fun. None of this is possible without attendees, and organizers currently lack an effective way to recruit them.
Our group has personally experienced these problems. It is common for us to hear about events that passed that we were never aware of. We also know students in clubs that struggle to recruit new members. One of our group members is actively searching for a better way to promote his stand-up comedy shows and reach a larger audience. We feel that when events across the Five College Consortium and surrounding towns are not consolidated and accessible, students become disconnected from their school, surrounding schools, and the area, diminishing the sense of community.
Literature Review
We started by reviewing existing literature to answer a few questions about the current landscape of college students and events.
What benefits do college students get out of events?
One study used qualitative research to analyze college students’ benefits from attending events (Drews et al.). The study collected 793 reflection papers from 206 students, who were each assigned to attend a certain number of cultural events. This study found that the main impacts of events on college students are positive impacts on their attitude (66%) and knowledge (27%), highlighting the importance of attending events as a college student.
What are the challenges and responsibilities of event organizers?
One study used the narrative inquiry approach and qualitative analysis of the experiences of a single event organizer with 13 years in the industry to answer this question (Baltazar & Gedorio). The study found that one of the biggest challenges was marketing: “Sometimes it is also a challenge to make an event when it comes to marketing. One of the biggest challenges is a ticketed concert, and I may not gain profit” (qtd. in Baltazar & Gedorio 48). The study suggested that many organizers strive for a better way to market events to event attendees. This is where a solution to our presented problem could come in.
How do college students find extracurricular events?
One study answered this question by promoting a public speaking competition through various marketing strategies and surveying the attendees to examine which strategies worked best (Foltz). The strategies used were flyers/promotional materials, in-class announcements (by professors), word of mouth, and word of mouth by employees at a speech center. Some of the key findings from this research revealed that in-class announcements were the most compelling advertising method to students, as almost 49% of students heard of the event from class/faculty. Flyers were the second most effective at 19% of students, followed by word of mouth at 15%, speech center visits at 9.4%, and other methods at 7.8% (Foltz 142).
While these results show evidence that in-class announcements, flyers, and word of mouth can be effective, there is a clear gap in the research as it does not include technological methods, such as finding an event through social media. Even in research where social media has been covered as a way to promote events, a single event-centered platform for this purpose has rarely been explored. Our solution aims to fill this gap — by making events discoverable through an easily accessible application on a phone or computer, we hope to find that this is an even more effective way for students to get involved in community events than current common mediums.
Works Cited
- Baltazar, L.C. and Gedorio, A.B. “Event Management: The Experiences of Organizers.” Development Education Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, vol. 6, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 30–62.
- Drews et al. “Evaluating the Effects of Cultural Event Attendance: A Qualitative Approach.” Juniata Voices, pp. 22–38. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284189659_Eval....
- Foltz, Kristen. “How Did You Hear About This Event? Analyzing Marketing Strategies to Increase Undergraduate Attendance at Extracurricular Events.” Florida Communication Journal, vol. 48, no. 2, Fall 2020, pp. 137–48. EBSCOhost.
Design Process for 5Hub
1. Persona Development
To develop empathy with our users and design for real people, we decided to build user personas. To do this, we conducted two types of primary research for two types of personas — student event attendees and student event organizers. First, we interviewed three event organizers (a band member, a Meditation Club organizer, and a comedian) to learn more about their pain points in the event organization process. All three shared a desire to have more students come to their events.
Next, we hosted an event (a podcast watch party of the popular Talk Tuah Podcast), which we marketed through many of the channels mentioned by the event organizers that we interviewed.
At the event, we surveyed 13 attendees to discover how they found out about this event, and how they feel about events in general. Through this process, we gained the insights that students want to go to more events and usually find out about events through word of mouth or friends.
Based on our primary research, we put together two personas for event organizers and event attendees. Below is one of the personas we created (Jake, the Fun-Seeking UMass Student).
2. Functionality Development
Based on our user personas, we defined the functionalities and tasks that our personas would want to be able to accomplish. Event organizers would like to be able to post about and advertise their events. Event attendees would like to RSVP to events, search for events, filter through events, share events with their friends. We also broke a lot of these functionalities down further into specific user tasks. For example, a task for the sharing functionality was “the user can click on an event and click the Share button.” This helped guide our designs for low-fidelity prototypes.
3. Low-Fidelity Prototyping
We came up with three low-fidelity prototypes for our solution, each addressing a major functionality we had identified in the first step.
Prototype 1
This prototype in the form of a phone app is for the functionality of sharing events with friends and upvoting events to influence popularity across the platform. To make this prototype, we used Balsamiq Wireframes. Through this prototype, we learned that the modality of a phone app is best for our solution because it is easiest to share events by text or social media on a phone. Since our persona, Jake, finds out about events mostly through friends sharing them with him on Instagram or text, this is one of the most important features for event attendees and organizers.
Prototype 2
This prototype is in the form of a dedicated console for finding events across the Five Colleges that could be placed in public areas, such as the Student Union or Campus Center at UMass. This is a storyboard that shows our persona Jake interacting with this screen to find events that he’s interested in by either typing in keywords into a search bar or filtering events by location, date, or other filters. This prototype prioritizes the user flow of how Jake would search for events, and exploring this user flow through this prototype made us realize that this is very intuitive.
Prototype 3
This prototype is a website that shows how Jake could RSVP to an event. From this sketch, we learned that RSVPing to an event should give Jake notifications for the event if details change, and that RSVPing should be as simple as one click for an optimal and convenient user experience.
4. High-Fidelity Prototype Development
For our final prototype, we decided to go for the modality of a phone app. The dedicated console (Prototype 2) isn’t as geographically accessible as a phone, and the website (Prototype 3) isn’t as easy to share through means like Instagram or texts. This prototype was divided into three main pages: (i) the home page, where users can search events, filter events, upvote events, share events, and RSVP to events; (ii) the add event page, where organizers can add new events; and (iii) the “My Events” page, where users can track events they are organizing and have RSVPed to. Users can navigate to these pages through the navigation bar at the bottom.
In the screenshot below, we can see a user’s home page, add event page, and My Events page.
For the sharing and upvoting functionality shown below, we made one change from Prototype 1 in that we made the share functionality one click into the OS share menu to make it more intuitive. Users can also click to upvote an event to boost popularity. For the RSVP functionality, we have the same one-click RSVP from Prototype 3, and users can see events that they have RSVPed to under the “Your Upcoming Events” section of the My Events page.
For the filtering and searching functionality, the user flow is very similar to Prototype 2. As can be seen below, a user can either type in a keyword in the search bar to find events, or they can toggle tags to filter events by location, time, sorting order, and other tags. For example, Jake can find a “meditation” event by typing the keyword into the search bar and can find events at UMass by choosing that filter.
For the adding an event functionality, a user can navigate to the Add Event page, add a poster to the event, fill in an event title, time, date, and cover, and optionally add event tags to help users find the event. Once the user posts the event, they can manage and view it from their My Events page.
Evaluation
To evaluate our system, we recruited students around the UMass campus to do cognitive walkthroughs of some key tasks:
- Searching for an event
- Applying filters to narrow down search results
- RSVPing to an event
- Creating an event and posting it
To evaluate the data, we took all of the notes from our cognitive walkthrough score sheet and used thematic analysis to identify what participants found the most confusing by coding, and from there what the most severe design flaws are by organizing the codes into themes. Through these themes, we learned what overarching problems our design had in terms of clarity of actions and features.
Results
We conducted our evaluation with five participants, each a UMass student. Overall, the participants did not have problems navigating our system. Their feedback indicated that they found searching for events straight-forward, as the search bar is easy to find and a familiar functionality. We also did not record any problems RSVPing, upvoting, and uploading events. For filtering events, there were some minor instances where participants seemed to have to spend more time than intended to find the designated “UMass” location filter we assigned as a part of an evaluation task. After seeing this, we streamlined the filter bar so that they have drop-down menus for locations and times. Other than that, many commented on the smooth and coherent feel of the system.
Our biggest change was removing the downvote feature. Previously, we had options for the user to both upvote events that they were interested in and downvote events that they did not feel strongly about. Our participants commented on this feature, one saying that they felt it did not promote the positive message of the app. After some reflection, we agreed that our app is meant to connect students together and foster a welcoming community and that a downvote button introduced unnecessary negativity. We then removed this feature from our design.
We determined these participant feelings through both observation and the themes captured in our thematic analysis. Examples of our codes, themes, and corresponding participant quotes are as follows:
Conclusion
Through this project, we learned the importance of designing systems that address real-world challenges faced by users in specific communities. Our development of 5Hub highlighted the value of consolidating fragmented information into a single, intuitive platform to foster engagement and connectivity. By conducting user testing, we confirmed that our design successfully facilitated event discovery and participation, with only minor adjustments needed, such as the removal of the downvote button to promote a more positive and inclusive experience.
Moving forward, we envision expanding 5Hub’s capabilities to include integration with public transportation schedules, personalized event recommendations based on user preferences/upvotes, and adding a way for ticketing and payment to be handled on the app. This project demonstrated how human-centered design principles can create a meaningful impact, and we hope that 5Hub can inspire similar solutions in other communities.