The short story.
In a fast-changing society, “adulting” is becoming increasingly disorienting for college students. I set out to create a solution to help young adults assimilate into the real world. Through user research, prototyping, and testing, I designed a native app for young adults access to crowdsourced adulting advice from their peers.
Why isn’t adulting a subject in school?
Stepping into a new campus, apartment, or job can be exceptionally arduous outside of the comfort of the home.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Timeline
9/2022 - 3/2023
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Miro, Google Forms
“Why do I still not feel like an adult after adulting?”
“Delving into oblivion.”
“Real world doesn’t operate like school.”
How might we help young adults navigate their college and postgrad years with ease and assurance?
“It’s lonely out here…”
“I miss being a kid.”
“It’s hard adjusting to a 40-hour work week.”
“…trying to become my own person…”
Initially,
I set out to create an app for young adults to access expert advice and parental wisdom from professionals and other seasoned adults.
To explore the validity of my assumptions and hone in on the direction of my project, I conducted competitive research, 7 user interviews, and a user survey. They helped me identify gaps among existing advice-giving apps, understand my users’ needs and pain points, and verify my findings with a larger sample size.
These assumptions served as a starting point for my research.
Competitive Research
Interview Insights Affinity Map
Sample Survey Question
During research, I discovered that…
young adults share advice because they want to contribute meaningfully to their community.
young adults seek advice from peers with who have been-there done-that.
older adults tend not to intervene in young adults’ lives, allowing them to figure things out themselves.
Turns out, young adults don’t need a way to get advice from experts and older adults, they need a platform to facilitate advice-exchange with their peers.
So… I was wrong about that.
Therefore,
I set out to create a forum-like peer-to-peer app, where young adults can crowdsource adulting advice.
During my research, I discovered (or confirmed) that young adults…
are unwilling to pay for advice.
need advice on similar adulting topics (finances, career, home maintenance etc.).
face obstacles making new friends post-college.
With these insights in mind, I built personas to capture the motivations, needs, and demographics of my users. Then, I created journey maps to pinpoint opportunities for my app to address these needs along the way. Here’s Claire, as an example:
Who are “young adults”?
What am I building?
Here’s how I translated some of my users’ needs into my designs:
Need
Unwillingness to pay for advice
Solution
Account creation and access through college’s subscription
Need advice on similar adulting topics
Filter advice posts based on topic
Obstacles making new firends post-college
Function for advice-seekers to meet-up with advice-givers
Pen to Paper Figma.
Equipped with an understanding of my users’ journey, I knit together user flows and began to create my first wireframes and prototypes:
To assess A for Adulting’s usability for new users interacting with the application for the first time on mobile, I gathered a diverse group of 6 participants (college-aged/recently graduated; ages 18-30) for moderated remote usability tests.
These tests prompted me to make the following 5 major changes on my final prototype:
Putting it to the test.
1. Users were confused by the navigation bar
2. Schedule meet-up functionality was hidden.
3. Vague onboarding page titles failed to communicate function.
4. Participants had trouble selecting the correct meet-up time.
5. Participants used advice categories improperly to filter for results.
