Drake University
BACKGROUND:
The audience for the Beautiful Bulldog Contest at Drake University is students, alumni, and other interested members of the public. The App Design & Development class at Drake was asked to create an app for this event, and the class presented final designs to the marketing department to incorporate the very first version of the app.
The contestants are chosen for the contest based on judge votes, but the contest organizers want to start promoting contest attendees to participate in the voting process. This will drive traffic to the event by giving audience members a say in the voting process, and an element of participation within the event.
GOALS:
- To create an app the Beautiful Bulldog’s audience will find useful and easily navigable.
- The interface should feel familiar so that the users don’t have a lengthy onboarding process.
- Increase traffic to the event
To increase the number of attendees for the event, social media accounts were incorporated throughout the app to create attention online. Following the contestant’s accounts leading up to the event will allow audience members to learn more about the personalities and background of the participants, before they cast their votes.
MATERIALS:
The Beautiful Bulldog App was created entirely in Adobe XD, with the auto-animation feature coming in handy to demonstrate how the app will transition between pages on mobile.
The XD mobile app provided a convenient way to test the project with a real set of users and get their feedback on the app.
RESEARCH:
User Research was conducted based on the demographic for the Beautiful Bulldog Contest. They were asked to perform a few tasks to see if they could easily participate in the voting process.
- Create a profile and add a dog as a contestant
- Vote for a dog and view the results
- Check the results to see what dog is in first place.
Changes based on user feedback:
- Users didn’t know they had to scroll down to click continue to register a bulldog. This was a simple fix because the button was off screen and had too much white space, so it did not seem scrollable to the user.
- The copy used to select a bulldog was unclear, and could be changed to be more clear
- Livestream needed to be placed at the bottom of the results page. Before this, it was hard to find and out of sight for the user.
The hierarchy of the card design was something else that was improved based on user feedback. On the first version (left design), it’s unclear where the eye is drawn to first. Should it go to the number of votes? The photo? The contestant’s name?
The second version (right design) improved on this by having the hierarchy of information on the card as: Placement –> Contestant Name –> Contestant Photo –> Number of Votes. The second version is more condensed and scannable, which will make it easier to show a large list of contestants.
OUTCOME:
During the development of this mobile app project, I learned how truly important getting real users to test your product is. You can’t really tell how someone will interact with an interface until you get real subjects to sit down and try to perform a task on an app.
Onboarding:
First, we have the onboarding process of the app. I placed the users into two different categories, contestants and attendees. After they provide a name, password, and email, they are either taken directly to the contestant page or to more onboarding if they are registering a dog for the event. Some information included would be: interesting facts about the dog, where their owner is from, and any social media pages their owner provides for the app. This allowed for participation outside the app so that the attendees could follow the dogs leading up to the event.
Contestants:
The contestant each has their own bio in the app, which includes interesting facts about them, photos/videos, and social media their owner provides during the onboarding phase. The goal with this design was to stick with the card design used throughout the app as a toast popup. This gave the impression that the user is on one continuous screen, and the immersion is not being broken throughout the discovery process of each contestant.
Voting:
Once the user enters the voting process, they are unable to ‘take back’ their vote for a contestant. They may see where their dog is placed overall in the event, but they may not vote again unless they provide a new account to vote from. After this, the user is brought to the Results tab where a live placement of each contestant in the event is shown.
Based on the research done through the user testing phase, incorporating social media into the event led to interest over time being maintained in the app. Through this process, I learned that something that seems so simple within an app is actually very complex. It’s important when in the ideation phase to make a developmental timeline of how long each feature would take before moving on to the design phase of the project.
Based on the research done through the user testing phase, incorporating social media into the event led to interest over time being maintained in the app. Through this process, I learned that something that seems so simple within an app is actually very complex. It’s important when in the ideation phase to make a developmental timeline of how long each feature would take before moving on to the design phase of the project.
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