Cattendance

The Challenge

During the COVID era, the necessity for remote work and schooling has been realized. However, a lot of universities have decided to resume in person to get back to regular school activities. This has led to the resumption of classes, especially crowded ones that might lead to the easy spread of the COVID-19 virus.

It is therefore necessary to have a record of data that is able to help in terms of reporting COVID-19 cases and contact tracing while keeping a data of attendance too

The Solution

Cattendance is an app that allows Ohio University students to record their attendance in each class as well as identify seat numbers for every class at the beginning of the semester. This helps to keep data of attendance, report infected cases and notify students sitting in close proximity to isolate. The app is intended to help curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Users

The Users of this platform will be the students and lecturers at Ohio University. The students will be using the app to record their course attendance while the lecturers can use the app to disseminate information as well as to allow access to students recording attendance for a particular class.

Role and Responsibilities

I was responsible for the UX research as well as the design of the product - paper wireframe, low fidelity prototype, high fidelity prototype and interactive design.

Tools

The tools for this project is Figma, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

Framework

Empathize

As a student of Ohio University as well as a Teaching Assistant in the first semester of my program, I was in pole position to understand the problem from each end of the spectrum. Additionally, user interviews were carried out with fellow teaching assistants as well as students to fully understand different perspectives to the problem. This led to the creation of user personas:

Define

After the initial identification of the background and users, the major essence for the app was clear and the necessary requirements for the app were defined as:

1. The app should have simple navigation and design to report COVID cases.
2. It should have notifications to alert students and instructors about identified COVID cases.
3. The app should allow for automatic marking of attendance using generated barcodes for each class.
4. It should also be the go to app for students to identify their schedules and classes.

Ideate

With the intention  of making it an easy to navigate app that takes the user directly to their goal, I drew the user flow as:

Prototype

I started from a hand sketched prototype on a whiteboard which was a quick walk through the user flow and wireframes.

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After completing the low fidelity, I received feedback on the designs that had an impact and resulted in some changes especially on the home screen. I then proceeded to create the high-fidelity wireframes

Test

The app prototype has only been tested by a few people with great feedback. It will be developed and tested further before any possible launch.

Takeaways

1. Timing of user research is very important. I worked on this during the Christmas break and that resulted in a reduced number of respondents for the project which stalled it for a while.

2. I was not able to use any other research methods apart from interview and I will be waiting to use other methods and see how that works out.

3. An app should be focused and it is okay to solve one problem at a time. Packing too many ideas into a project from the start might end up complicating it too much. As such, it is okay to start from a focused point and expand subsequently.