PIPs CU Boulder

PIPs Challenges App

Role: Lead Design & Research

Overview

PIPs came to CU Boulder with a bold proposal to launch a new student centric version of their app focus on challenges and educational components that would focus on behavior change in the student population and greater engagement with the institution and local businesses and partners.

My role at PIPs was to lead the design sprints and come up with the new functions, features, aesthetics and functionality of the app with the small team at hand. I was also responsible for all of the on-site research and testing.

  • Sprint!

    PIPs was awarded a Google Small Business Grant and flown in to sprint with the masters. This is how we got started on product and design and we learned a ton of useful tools.

  • Logic and flow

    Once we narrowed down the key focus of our app and our features we needed to figure out how to make it work with the existing PIPs platform and how exactly a user would move through the app.

  • Personas

    We needed to learn everything we could about the students on campus and design and market according to their needs and expectations. This was a major effort.

Humble beginnings

PIPs at CU Boulder started very humbly with a very novice but motivated team. We learned to work efficiently and effectively using the tools available and what Google had taught us.

The early days were spent throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck and what worked. This lead us to begin prototyping and live testing with student users and research assistants.

Market and user research

We did a comprehensive competitor audit and developed personas and task lists to organize our thoughts on what was working, who we’d be serving, and what we could do better or differently.

Having actionable insight on successful competing apps and task lists to help us organize our thoughts on how our users would use and navigate the app proved crucial for our design and build processes.

Personas are also incredibly useful for baseline understanding across teams and with non product or design partners and clients as they allow us to tell stories and build empathy.

Makings of a mock

Working with internal stakeholders across the campus and our team, we defined logic, built out user flows and journeys, built prototypes, and began translating our ideas to pixels that we could test.

This was our first foray into going from paper to pixel to code and we couldn’t have been more excited.

This is also where we began to identify real hurdles and problems to overcome with data, systems on campus, geolocation, partners, you name it. Big problems were emerging that we’d need to solve with our designs and with our partners.

Launching and testing

Working for a public institution, we were fortunate enough to have accessibility discussions early on in our process and built into our ethos.

We were also fortunate to have access to a huge audience of potential users from which we could put prototypes in front of as we conducted research and moved through iterations.

We learned early on that students would need an app that was simple, thoughtless, aesthetic, and provided enough value for their time.

This lead to many critical design decisions and pivots along the way, including enhanced UI, automation features, and valuable rewards and catalogs.