Geest Mobile App

Geest is a campus news app designed to keep students informed and connected. It allows users to share and discover real-time updates, stories, and events happening around their school. With a reward system that recognizes active contributors through leaderboards and upvotes, Geest turns staying updated into an engaging experience, ensuring no student misses out on what’s happening around them.

The goal was to create a platform that helps students stay updated and connected to campus life in real time. Most students often miss important events or updates, so Geest set out to make information easy to access, encourage participation through rewards, and build a sense of community around sharing campus news.

The approach was to design a reward-based system that motivates students to share and engage with campus news. Users move up the leaderboard when their posts get upvoted and lose points when they’re downvoted. This creates a fun, competitive way to keep information flowing while ensuring only relevant and accurate updates rise to the top.

Students often miss campus events, announcements, or opportunities because information is spread across multiple social media platforms, notice boards, or word of mouth. There was no single, trusted space for students to get timely updates or share verified news. The challenge was to design a platform that made campus information centralized, credible, and engaging.

To understand the communication gap, I conducted informal interviews with students across different faculties. Most said they relied on group chats or hearsay for campus updates, which were often unreliable or delayed. I also analyzed existing platforms like Reddit, Yik Yak, and school forums to identify engagement patterns and community-driven features that worked.

From the research insights, three main ideas stood out:

Make it community-driven : students should feel ownership of the content.

Add gamification : reward users for contributing and verifying credible stories.

Keep it minimal and fast: since students value simplicity and quick access.

These insights guided the structure of the information flow, layout hierarchy, and the reward mechanics.

I focused on creating an interface that felt familiar yet fresh. Clean typography, bright accents, and an intuitive bottom navigation made it easy to explore stories, share posts, and track rankings. The leaderboard and upvote system were positioned as central elements to encourage participation and accountability.

An early prototype was tested with a small group of students. Feedback revealed that users loved the leaderboard concept but wanted clearer distinctions between verified and unverified posts. Based on this, I added visual indicators for verified stories and simplified the post creation process to reduce friction.

The final prototype achieved a balance between simplicity and engagement. It provided a reliable, real-time news feed that students could trust and contribute to. The reward system and gamified structure encouraged ongoing participation, transforming how students interacted with campus information.

One major challenge was figuring out how to make students actively share news rather than just consume it. Another was ensuring the information stayed accurate and relevant while keeping the app simple enough for anyone to use. Balancing engagement, credibility, and ease of use was key throughout the design process.

Geest made it easier for students to stay informed and connected with campus life. The reward system increased participation, encouraging more students to share updates and verify information. Overall, it helped build a stronger sense of community and kept students engaged with real-time happenings around them.

The final design delivered a smooth and engaging experience where students could easily share, discover, and interact with campus news. User testing showed improved participation and satisfaction, proving that the concept effectively solved the problem of missed updates and disconnected campus communities.