All The World's Students in One Place

Campus Society is a student-focused app aiming to provide a single place for students to connect, collaborate and share knowledge on one single platform. Students from all over the world can chat and post in channels with a channel being anything that a user would like it to be. I was brought in initially to improve the onboarding and signup flow of the app but this quickly expanded into all areas of the application. From re-imagining content creation to navigation on the web and mobile platform.

In order to improve or even to feel like I could offer suggestions on improving the onboarding flow, I felt that it was imperative to perform some research. What I learned quickly from simply looking at the analytics data was that users were not engaging with the app at all after completing the sign up. After completing interviews with a selection of potential users it became clear why. There was very much a feeling of reaching a void. Users would be placed into three starter channels, one for their university, one for their course and then a general information channel. There was an issue with this however because we still didn't have the official backing of the universities and this meant there was no real content in the university channels. Similarly the course channels felt the same. Users were lost and had no idea how to find content they were looking for or that was relevant.

I identified three key areas that we needed to improve immediately within the app.

1. Content - users didn't have access to the right information
2. Discoverability - users couldn't find other channels or topics they were interested in
3. Confidence - users didn't know where they were when they were jumped straight into a channel so we needed to provide them context and security which would ultimately lead to confidence

I was exceptionally clear on where we needed to improve and immediately set to work.

Initial sketches of ideas on how we might introduce concepts to new users. These ideas included guided tours through the app which could be turned off or on with a Help / Tips icon. Intuitively we all knew though that if the app needed this much explanation, then we had bigger fish to fry.

Onboarding

Whilst there was a wealth of channels that boasted interesting and engaging content, users were simply not reaching the point of immersion where by they could organically discover content that was interesting to them. With this in mind two improvements were suggested.

1. Allow users to specifiy interests during the onboarding flow
2. Enable the tagging of posts and content that would be searchable and over time provide a richer, more contextual search experience

The image above shows some of the conceptualising for these improvements. Inspiration was taken from Medium and other platforms that allowed for better discoverability of content. Users could specify interest areas when signing up, they would be shown channels that would perhaps be of interest that they could join and jump straight into conversation in. We enabled the tagging of channels when they were being created so they would more easily be indexed for search.

I also looked at ways into the app that would provide the user more context as to the purpose of the app and where the benefit lay for them. Mockups were sketched of simple invite flows for users in the platform and users off the platform. I liaised with the tech team a lot to understand what was possible and how we could better improve the experience of our new users that perhaps were unclear on the value proposition.

Screen showing one of the post creation screens that could potentially be used on the platform allowing the user to add tags and better contextualise their posts. New formatting tools were also added to enable richer styling.

Gamification

In order to drive engagement and encourage users to participate even more on the platform, a simple system was devised in the early days of the site. Similar to the grading system in the United States which, given that our primary audience was in the UK I questioned straight away but lost the vote on. The GPA score is a way for users to measure their level of engagement on the platform and this score needs constant maintenance else it will go down. This initial system provided a perfect starting point for a revamped system that would enable users to earn more for their efforts on the platform.

The new system would introduce badges that a user could earn by engaging on the platform. They would be able to see their GPA constantly improve and increase without going down after a period of inactivity when they may simply have been studying and not had the time for the platform. From here there would be numerous ideas for which the system could expand including credits which could be redeemed for rewards on the platform.

This was seen as a plausible way to improve retention and increase engagement on the platform by the management and marketing teams but I had my doubts. Ultimately I did not believe that we should need to bribe our users in order to be on our platform. The very committed amongst them could even I feared game the system in order to receive rewards consistently as some form of income. This whole piece needed a deeper consideration in my opinion and whilst I worked on this I believed that as a team there were areas of the apps and platform that needed vastly more improvement than reimagining the GPA scoring system.

Textbooks. Covered.

As well as a lack of context, one of the other vital pieces that users felt was missing from Campus Society as a learning platform was the lack of access to learning materials. It seemed like Campus Society lacked focus, it was trying to be too many things to all users. Armed with this feedback we took the initiative to conduct more interviews with users in order to understand what exactly this meant for them. Whilst it would be a huge gamble and task to implement technically, it was clear we needed to bring textbooks to the platform. Thankfully the business were incredibly excited about the idea that we could launch books on the platform and provide students with all the resources they would need for their studies. Totally aligned with the brand ethos of being by students, for students, this idea grew and soon the resources were put in place to kick the project off. We researched competitors and had a look at their offering and how we could go about improving it. We asked students what features they would want and how we could potentially integrate with the third party services to get the product launched. Launching in January this is an incredibly exciting new offering for students. All from listening to our users.