Tech4Good
Social Computing Lab @ University of California, Santa Cruz
Project Type
Research Project:
- Research Paper
- App Prototype
Tools
Figma
FigJam
Excel
Qualtrics
FigJam
Excel
Qualtrics
Duration
Spring 2023 - present
My role
UX/UI Designer and Researcher
Project Summary
A research initiative that centers on technology-assisted activities within collocated community events. Our inquiry looks into how we can use design to support relationship-building and engage participants in such a way that they are the ones determining the dynamics of the activity, so that they can achieve their collective and individual goals. We are currently iterating on application designs for development, executing protostudies and user tests, and writing a research paper.
Responsibilities
Brainstorm research topics
Research, analyze, and summarize related works
Ideate prototypes for collocated interaction testing
User testing (in-person, Google Forms, and Qualtrics)
Iterate app designs on Figma
Meet with the team and professor weekly
The Problem
Community events (e.g. luncheons, conferences, club meetings) serve as critical catalysts for relationship building, network expansion, and the collaborative generation of novel ideas. Despite their potential for fostering valuable connections, many events, especially traditional conferences, often devolve into transactional encounters, delegating the onus of crafting effective networking strategies entirely to individual attendees, a burden left unaddressed by event organizers.
But wait...
The Solution?
Recognizing the limitations of traditional event design where attendee agency is often limited, co-creation strategies offer a novel approach to bridge the gap between participant needs and event content. By encouraging attendees to co-design the “human bingo” experience through pre-event survey submissions (which will generate targeted conversation prompts), organizers can foster a sense of shared ownership and responsibility. Doing so might mitigate feelings of disconnection, and instead, promote authentic, community-centric relationships.
This shift towards a more collaborative model presents a critical area for further research, exploring the most effective methods for implementing co-creation strategies within diverse event contexts. Our research looks into implementing co-creation, through several events, by gathering information about an attendee’s goals and interests. We hope to find that by allowing attendees autonomy in the layout of the event, and by introducing co-creation, attendees will find it easier to achieve their goals and build genuine relationships.
Objectives + Goals
Help Event Attendees
Improve their experiences by making icebreakers memorable and actually about *them*
Help Event Coordinators
Organize their events, while helping them to elicit real connections from their event-goers.
Make Networking Fun
Make forced social interaction feel game-like, but natural simultaneously
Research
Looking Into The Literature
When this research initiative began in Spring 2023, we started off with the idea of building a “mixer app for in-person community events,” as given to us by our professor. Subsequently, we began looking into the literature to see what research was out there in the realm of HCI discussing large in-person events and technology interventions to improve social interaction and connection.
Upon our initial literature review, we started synthesizing our research to begin writing an abstract of what we wanted to study. We organized what we found into a spreadsheet by the various categories and topics of research we found. The goal was to categorize our literature so that when it comes time to write the paper and connect our areas of interest, we would have all of our literature organized and analyzed, ready to go.
After some initial brainstorming, we solidified our area of research to study collocated interactions within educational settings, partly because we would be able to conduct user testing easily as college students, and also because classrooms are abundant with collocated interactions. After some discussion with our Professor, we decided to expand our focus to collocated interactions at larger events (i.e. luncheons, social gatherings, conferences, etc.).
Ideation
Initial Ideation
We wanted to test our idea in a space with a large gathering. This would be social gatherings, conferences, hackathons, classrooms, etc. Initial brainstorms led us to decided to build an app in Figma, with an event attendee-facing version and an event coordinator-facing version.
Our first idea was to build a mobile view for the event-goers, and a projector or tablet view that would display some questions at specific tables. This latter view would have helped people facilitate their networking by providing questions to discuss. However, after many discussions as a team, we decided to scrap this idea because it just wasn’t strong enough. We needed an intervention that would actually allow autonomy to the users, not just a question guide that they could follow if they wanted.
Projector Wireframes
Mobile Wireframes
Initial User Flows
Current Ideas
After roughly 10 weeks and a whole summer break, we decided to investigate the concept of “Human Bingo”. We saw this is an interesting and novel concept that might allow us to reach one of our goals of making event interactions more fun and memorable. As a result, we have spent the last 15 weeks ideating and iterating on a Human Bingo app. Our idea was that event-goers would fill out a pre-event form before they attended the event, and within the Human Bingo would be Bingo prompts based off of the responses to those pre-event forms, thereby eliciting some user input before the game even begins. Although we have only tested this concept once, we believe this is the idea that will allow the users more autonomy in their event-going experiences.
Where are we now?
Continuing Research and Iterating
As of Winter 2023, we are continuing to write our research paper and conducting some product testing on the side. We are continuing to iterate our designs to improve usability and aesthetics, as well as working on the mechanics of our Human Bingo concept.
*Current* Mobile Designs
The Idea... So Far
We ask our event attendees to fill out the pre-event survey. Upon receiving the responses, we make Bingo prompts that reflect the responses of the event attendees. When these event-goers show up to the event, they play our Human Bingo game as an icebreaker. To their surprise, they see the Bingo prompts reflecting themselves and their goals. After playing the game, they fill out post-event surveys to help us further iterate our concept.
Prior to our first official study, we are conducting smaller protostudies with other Tech4Good lab groups and in our lab socials to evaluate our product and its functionality. This includes creating new pre and post-event surveys pertaining to those smaller groups and different bingo cards as well.
