Unibuzz is a b2c social media app with an exclusive campus community for first-years to anonymously share stories, experiences, and challenges as college students. They face this new experience; where everything changes, they feel out of place and bottle things up, which might affect their social and academic life. This is a final project at Apple Developer Academy in Jakarta.

Founded: 2022

Industry: Social media

Project: Macro challenge of Apple Developer Academy

We aim to help first-years have a platform to express their thoughts and share information as they transition into college.

First-year college students, especially those who struggle to adjust.

Research, ideation, user flow, IA, UI, prototype, moderation, concept & usability testing, branding.

I worked as the Lead designer here with Disty as the designer, Iona as the product manager, and Kevin, Farhan, and Hada as the coders.

successful tasks from 6 users for our qualitative UT for all the significant flows

score for Screen Usability Score (SCUS) from Maze for creating a post flow.

We conducted extensive and extensive research processes ranging from interviewing psychological experts to interviewing college students.

2/3 of college students were struggling with loneliness and feeling isolated in 2020 (The Brink Research from Boston University, 2020).

It started way before the pandemic: There was a considerable increase in loneliness from 2014 (16.5%) to 2018 (23.6%) (Hysing, Petrie, Bøe, Lønning, & Sivertsen, 2019).

Before meeting our users, we wanted to know the science behind it. We met one clinical psychologist and one academic psychologist to understand the mental state of first-year students.

The first semester of their college is when students feel anxious

They’re transitioning from online school routines to offline

W curve: they get excited, get culture shock, adjust, hit bottom again, and adjust again.

When they fail to adjust, their academics or even mental health can worsen.

They don’t have to feel attached to their friends; they just have to feel accepted in the beginning.

We interviewed 9 college students college students from 2 universities. After grasping what’s going on with first-year students, we used extreme lenses to ask them to tell their powerful stories, such as loneliness, sadness, or anxiety cases. The goal was to know how they dealt with adjusting to college.

Identity: Alex is a first-year semester student experiencing a rollercoaster ride of adjusting from high school to college. With everything changing, he has to adjust academically and socially.

Goals: To have a community to hold on to, to share their feelings, and not get judged

Pains: Feeling unfamiliar with the new people, place, culture, and routines, being left out, bottling things up, not knowing who to talk to

Gains: Telling their stories and struggles, becoming a part of a social group, knowing what’s going on around them

We get that extrinsic motivation without good internal motivation wouldn’t work. But since users already have the internal motivations (i.e., expressing their thoughts), we worked on the extrinsic motivations (i.e., being able to change their pseudo names, create channels, and more)

We encourage our users to collect honey drops. They can change their pseudo name if their honey jar is complete (20 drops of honey). With their profile picture just colour and two letters, changing their pseudo name is one of the few ways to express themselves.

The main objective of this gamification is to create a timeline (Hive) where users engage in it and interact with each other. We can reach this goal by giving them honey drops every time they give upvotes and comments, creating buzz, and creating words that get upvoted.

This project was pivotal because it taught me the most dangerous thing as a designer and researcher: bias.

Bias can lurk from within yourself, your team, and even your users. What revealed these biases is receiving feedback from our mentors and our users early on.

But in the end, we managed to pivot and change our point of view when looking at our problem. We tested the design and received 100% successful tasks from 6 users for our qualitative usability testing for all the significant flows.