By The Way
What's the scene?
At Srishti Manipal Institute’s very own internal communication channel, get to know all the clubs, talks, events and much more. Let us keep you connected to the faculty, student body and alumni: A one-stop destination to unite, grow and chill.
My Role
UX Designer and Researcher
The Team
Human Centered Design Students
Visual Comm. Students
Service Design Students
Information Design Students
Tools Used
Adobe XD
Miro
Duration
2 week workshop
March 2021
My Key Contributions
User Research
Concept Ideation
Prototyping
Web Design
Process
Research
Secondary Research
Primary Research
Generate Insights
Ideation
Basic Sketches and Experimentation
Prototyping
Final Sketches
Mockup on XD
Present
Presentation to a panel of faculty
The Start
Problem Space
With only a two week duration, our class of 20 was given a project of doing any internal branding project for Srishti. Initially, we thought of coming up with events, new class ideas, workshop ideas, etc. However, as we discussed we felt the need to solve a key issue the students here face.
Having a large community of students, the communication of information on the different happenings in our college (such as events, student clubs, student initiatives, student work, etc) was extremely scattered and not easily accessible. (multiple instagram pages, no clear direction from the college website)
Hence, how might we bring together all the information and communicate it in a more coherent and regular manner while also being fun and student friendly?
Secondary Research
Secondary research conducted in order to get an understanding of :
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Internal Communication Channels of other college
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Type of content in such channels
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To what extent can someone outside their college view such content
Primary Research
Primary research conducted through a survey for student across all courses and batches to understand :
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Their opinions on existing communication channels
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What they could improve on?
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The need for a new mode of communication.
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Their preferred modes of communication
After receiving 400 responses from students across all fields and years, we analyzed the data points and generated insights.
Key Insights
Insight #1
Accessibility and clear updates → Higher usage
If the students knew exactly where to find these platforms or could go to a single place instead of extensively searching for them every time, they would regularly access them to view the content.
Right now, the Srishti instagram does not mention the other pages for clubs and student work and hence, not many students know about them.
Insight #2
Clear direction for all platforms
Each platform felt extremely disconnected from the other and there wasn’t any coherence between each platform. Many events taking place weren’t regularly updated in the accounts as word as a result of which, word of mouth was heavily relied on. However, word of mouth doesn’t reach many people.
Insight #3
No sense of community
Srishti has scattered buildings and not a single campus. Hence, we already don’t have a sense of community unlike other colleges. Moreover, the scattered modes of communication just add to this feeling as many students, especially first years who don’t know where to go to access event dates and club resources.
Ideation
Keeping all the insights from our research in mind, I ideated on different ways we could cater to these insights. Ideation topics included ways to use the platforms, the web interface, user journey, user flow and the content on our final interface. I had mainly worked on the web interface on XD.
Welcome to By The Way!
Clubs and Events
By The Way keeps you connected to all the clubs and events at Srishti such as Scatter One (Dance club), Mujo (event organization), Mandali (Theatre) and more! All details about upcoming events, event calendars, sign ups for clubs and more will be easily accessible to all Srishti students through the BTW portal.
Socials
Links to all the social media accounts under Srishti will be available on BTW. From the dance Instagram accounts to the weekly uploads of the theatre group on YouTube, all the social media accounts will be easily accessible through the BTW website.
Magazine
Srishti’s very own editorial, What the Faff, will be available through the BTW website. With direct links to the latest edition of the editorial as well as the portal to purchase the the printed copy of it will be available through BTW.
Accesibility
By The Way would act as a portal to various other Srishti platforms such as the instagram page, club pages, the Srishti magazine and more. This portal can be accessed directly through the home page of the Srishti website - a site which every student knows about right from their first year making it easily accessible.
Clear Directions
The portal will contain a landing page with links and directions to the different pages and resources.
Sense of Community
In order to coherently communicate information and create a sense of community at the same time, we decided to create a brand called By The Way with the tagline What’s the Scene? (a popular slang used by Srishti students as a way of asking what’s going on or how things are).
Addressing the Insights
Srishti’s very own internal communication channel.
Get to know all the clubs, talks, events and much more. Let us keep you connected to the faculty, student body and alumni: A one-stop destination to unite, grow and chill.
Prototyping
BTW logo to enter the login screen
Switch to btw brand colours
CAROUSEL VIEW OF CLUB AND EVENT PAGES, SOCIALS AND EDITORIAL SECTIONS
Challenges We Faced
Due to the time constraints, we were unable to get any concrete user feedback. This is a very important step however, we were only able to show it to a few students and not conduct a proper feedback session.
Once this project goes ahead, we will conduct a feedback session and improve on the existing prototype.
This project was then presented to a panel of Srishti faculty, each from a different field. We got feedback on the visuals, brand and the interface.
Final Thoughts
After a busy 2 weeks, the team was extremely proud of the work we had accomplished in such a short span. The panel of faculty praised the amount of research conducted to generate insights as it is a step we initially used to rush through as students.
One thing we would definitely have worked on was to plan our timeline better to have gotten user feedback. Moreover, with more time we could have worked on the interface and user flow more to create a higher fidelity prototype.