Gated

Year: 2023 - 2024

A presentation slide titled "Building College Community Through User Experience Design" by Jillian Milton, Digital Media and Design at UConn. On the left side, there is a red and blue pie chart based on responses from 301 UConn students. It shows that 66.4% prefer an academic app and 33.6% prefer a social app. Below the chart, two top dissatisfactions with current apps are listed: 1. Biased professor reviews (56%) and 2. Not enough UConn students on the platform (51%). The central problem is stated as students having difficulty connecting with others for academic needs. Three illustrated user personas are shown: Group Chat Charley, Grad School Gary, and Lacrosse Larissa. On the right side is a mockup of a smartphone screen showing a student app with a search result for "ACCT 2001" and profile cards for four people: Bob Jones, Charlotte Weber, Jiao Chen, and Aiden Katz. The UConn logo is in the bottom right corner.

For my Honors Senior Thesis in Web Design, I built Gated, a mobile app that helps college students meet their academic needs in a closed community. I spent the first half of the year conducting market research and administering surveys to assess students’ needs. By the end of 2023, I created a wireframe and a prototype in Figma to envision Gated's look and feel. Finally, during the Spring 2024 semester, I programmed the app's front-end and back-end, wrote the thesis paper, and presented my work to the STEM Scholar community.

A current problem at UConn is that students need help finding peers in their major and unbiased professor reviews. I surveyed 323 UConn students to quantify the need, and 66% wanted an academic app. Gated was coded with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and a PostgreSQL database.

In my design process, I developed user personas, or fictional characters, to represent key audience segments. Some include "Group Chat Charley" and "Grad School Gary." Group Chat Charley needs help with her Accounting class this semester. She can search for students in her course using the Search People feature. The app will generate search results so that she can create a group chat. Grad School Gary is med-school bound. He wants to research future professors that match his learning style and maintain a high GPA. Gary can go to Search Courses and search for Chemistry professors. He can see each of their reviews based on other Gated users. Gated demonstrates that UX design can help students create purposeful connections to meet their academic needs.

Mobile phone screen displaying the homepage of a college networking app called 'GATED'. At the top, there is a graphic of a stylized gate, followed by the app name in teal and the tagline 'Unlock your college experience' in brown. Below is a short description: 'Find new people and insider information on campus.' There are three prominent buttons labeled 'Search People,' 'Search Courses,' and 'My Courses.' Further down, a 'Notifications' section shows messages, including one from Charlotte Weber saying 'Thanks I’ll need it!' and another related to 'CHEM 1127Q'. A menu icon appears in the top left corner, and a profile icon is in the top right.