Happening
Co-developed a platform to facilitate how students discover what's happening on campus. Happening is a site where students can view all of the events, applications, and projects that occur at Stanford. Additionally, they can view and subscribe to different organizations/clubs.
Problem: With the hundreds of organizations at Stanford, it can be hard for students to find out about events of their interest in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming. Receiving hundreds of emails through their inbox makes it easy for important deadlines to get lost and difficult for emerging clubs to get their word across.
Goal: Develop a platform where students can easily see events of their interest and clubs/organizations can promote their activities.
Solution: Build a web-based platform where students can see campus and club events, applications, and projects and easily filter them based on their interests. Additionally, allow student leaders to create organizations and share their work
How I went about this problem:
1. After having noticed this problem as a student myself, I decided to interview other club leaders to find out about the specific challenges they face. Once I gathered their insights, these were my main takeaways:
1. After having noticed this problem as a student myself, I decided to interview other club leaders to find out about the specific challenges they face. Once I gathered their insights, these were my main takeaways:
- Email lists are restrictive: there’s nothing campus-wide
- Getting too many mails is overwhelming
- Keeping people engaged and interested is hard (flake culture)
- Clubs don’t have deliverables
2. I investigated what other solutions where out there:
- Cardinal Engage: a platform where you could see clubs and campus events. However, most students did not use it due to the unfriendly user experience. As a result, events where not updated regularly and one could not truly see what was happening around campus.
- In the Cards: A successful mailing list that promoted the main events happening each week. However, students still couldn't see all events or tailor the information based on their interests.
3. We discovered that a platform, Happening, was being developed by one of my colleagues that addressed some of the issues regarding this challenge. I presented my findings from the interviews and additional feature implementations I had in mind.
4. I created a low-fidelity prototype on Figma improving the user flow and implementing additional features to tackle all aspects of the problem.
5. I then programed the front-end of the website using React Native. Key features/changes implemented:
- Added a separate application and projects page, so that student leaders could promote more aspects of their clubs (not just events).
- Improved the filter implementation. Added a calendar filter, so that students can sort out events and applications based on their dates/deadlines, and an organization filter, so that students can filter items based on organizations they are subscribed to.
- Created a page where student leaders could manage their creations and organizations.
- Added RSVP and save buttons to events, applications, and projects.
Link to website: https://happening.college/
Link to website: https://happening.college/
Example of Figma Home Page Design
