Gjourn

May 2024
INST4398J at the University of Maryland

OVERVIEW

Bringing Files Together from Across the Web

Gjourn is a cloud-based file hosting platform designed to bring files from across the web into one, easy-to-navigate platform. Bringing files from cloud services like Figma, Google Drive, Notion, and Canva will help students and coworkers easily find the work of their teammates, streamlining the curation process and speeding up the work for the rest of the group.

Problem

Students can have a tough time communicating with their group and keeping track of all their files. Running around the internet trying to see if your teammate completed their section of the project can be exhausting and ruin any momentum you’ve built up for the work day. You ask your teammates to put all their work in the group Dropbox or Google Drive folder, but how are you supposed to put a Figma or Canva file into Dropbox?

Our Goal

Give students and coworkers a platform to keep all their cloud-based work in one easy-to-find place

Make using Gjourn individualized for every group

Support groupwork through making Gjourn as simple as possible while providing the functionality needed to make it worth using

Discover

Understanding our Userbase

To better understand the problem, we first need to understand those who are most affected by them.

To get a better hold of our potential userbase, we needed to speak to people in our demographic. This involved multiple 1-on-1 interviews as well as a survey sent out to fellow students in order to find out what students found most challenging about being a student.

From the results of our interviews and survey, we created an empathy map and affinity map to group together some main ideas. These were the top concerns we gathered.

– Students had a tough time balancing multiple group projects at once, either getting them mixed up with each other or having trouble communicating timely with so many people

– Students had issues keeping track of everyone’s work for any particular project, especially if a lack of communication was present

– Students had trouble using multiple web services for one group, as necessary work could be on any particular service

Ideate

How Might We’s and Sketching Solutions

After learning about the biggest pain points from students currently, we moved on to the process of trying to solve these issues. Our process started with defining these problems and quickly throwing out ideas as to potential solutions. While these sketches and subsequent conversations were crude in nature, getting our minds in a flow state allowed for ideas to flow naturally and ideas easily grew from simple proposals to more concrete solutions.

These were some of our most promising ideas and their subsequent HMW.

File Collector

How might we help support students through less than optimal group projects?

Freshman Support Group

How might we help students learn more about the differences between high school and college life?

Foster Student Connections

How might we help foster connections between students and create friendships across the school?

Mood Boarding

After deciding on our problem and potential solution for said problem, we moved on to mood boarding our new project. This process aimed to find a theme for our project as well as a core ideals we would be designing around. After looking at competitors in the file management space and learning what they lacked, we finalized our mood board that would keep us focused as we moved on throughout the rest of the project.

PRototype

Wireframe and Initial Testing

Getting our ideas onto paper was the first step toward seeing our ideas become a reality. Understanding the importance of user feedback and testing, we prioritised speed and clarity when creating our first paper prototypes, as we wanted to get as much useful feedback as possible within the short timeframe of this project.

From our testing of this paper prototype, we were able to learn some critical information about our product:

– Users were confused how they could create new teams

– There was an overall lack of unuqueness with the design language

– Users were confused on differnces betweeen “Team” and “Folder” sections

High Fidelity Prototyping

After learning this key information, we began to transition our prototype to a digital space. This allowed for us to engage in higher quality testing (if we had more time) and fully realize our initial ideas.

Here are some of the biggest changes we made to our original design:

Introduce Customisability

Scrapping previous color scheme and adopting new, neutral color scheme with ability for users to pick their own color for each folder and team, making each user experience unique and navigation easier

Improving Usability

Changing certain icons (new teams, new folder) to buttons with text to make functionality clearer

Adding Interactability

Adding hover effects so users know which buttons are most important (file buttons)

Takeaways

What did we learn?

While there are some improvements we feel could be made, as is with any project, we feel we delivered on the ideals of our users found throughout our testing phases and manajed to create a product that could actually help our fellow students. For me, personally, the biggest takeaway from this project that I will take with me for the rest of my career is the importance of high-quality user testing and user research. Without knowing what painpoints our users actually face, there is no way to know if what you’re creating actually solves a problem. Being able to connect with your userbase as much as possible throughout the design process will ensure their opinions and ideas are constantly in the mind of the design team.