Identifying the Problem
In short, at Northeastern University, people don't know what's happening around campus. There are three major pain points for students who want to attend or be informed about an event, but never see or hear about an event until it's too late: The state of the bulletin boards around campus, the current events calendar, and the postings on social media.
Above are a collection of photos of different bulletin boards around campus. The boards featured many events around campus, but many posters were outdated or overpowered by non-university approved ads such as off-campus lessons or get money quick schemes. Although many were placed in strategic, fairly high-traffic points on campus, there was often too much clutter to see the most relevant information at a glance.
The current events website isn't as effective as it could be. Surveys that are often irrelevant for the average university student are pushed to the top with their daily updates. Classes are also listed at the top, and students looking at the events page are usually not enrolled in them (see above - Glacial and Quaternary History class). Actual events and activities are pushed to the bottom of the page.
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Categories are all listed to the right, but most have nothing in their respective sections. To even see them all, the user needs to scroll down the page or shrink it to a more manageable size.
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Social media is nearly non existent, if not for the individual event organizers making their event public. At the time, there was am existing Northeastern Events Facebook page, but it was last updated in 2013: 4 years before this project began.
Research
Quite a bit of research was done for this project. We ranged from asking students how they experience events on campus, what they wanted more of, and doing research on how the current event sites and bulletin boards are moderated, right down to calling those in charge of the school website and asking for their reasoning behind the choices made.
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We sent out a survey to over 150 students (the majority was from Northeastern, but many were from other schools) asking them a wide variety of questions about how they find out about and experience events on and off campus. Below are some of our results.
Additionally, from our data, we gathered that about 92% of students actively participate in on-campus events, 20% get information from the bulletin boards, and 60% get their information from posters and pop-up ads around campus.
Below are four personas we created to help get a better idea of who might benefit from an updated system and what they would want.
Below is a narrative arc chart simply describing the parts of a story in which a person sees the problem, finds the solution, and is happy with the outcome.
Additionally, we made an experience map to show both sides of the process once our solution is implemented. It's a much simpler process and much easier than the existing one.
Finally, we merged the narrative arc and experience map together to create a timeline of how the event process, from conceptualization to aftermath, would occur.
End Result
Our final products connected the universality and convinience of the digital interface with visibility in physical spaces.
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Our first solution is an update to the Northeastern events website. We created a system with much cleaner organization that is directly linked to the Northeastern Social Media accounts. All event organizers would need to do is submit the event information and poster and submit. Submissions would need to be approved, but that can be done with just the click of a button on the administrator's side. You can view our coded prototype here. Below are images of the page in action.
​Bulletin boards will be posted around campus. These will be easy to install with location-oriented featured events and the others listed below, flipping through to show the next week's highlights.
These boards will be posted in high traffic areas, with locations both out and indoors.
Poster
Here are the posters we included with our final proposal.
Movie
Here is the film we shot and edited featuring the boards and website in action.
Transcript:
No Mo Fomo: an experience design project. Fo-Mo: Fear of missing out. Anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere. Meet Steven, a student experiencing fomo. The bulletin boards around campus are disorganized and in random locations, and Northeastern's current event resources doesn't list every studen organization event; they're sometimes outdated too. To solve this problem, we present a solution that will bring the convinience of the digital space into the physical world: an organized platform for students, event organizers, and adminitrators. Introducing the improved events eBulletin with a featured events section, scrolling animations, the current time, and a calendar layout for organization. Steven meets eBulletin. Fomo is no longer a problem for Steven. No mo fomo.