CampusLife

The motivation for this project began a few months after the first phase of a new event management app was implemented by a church and it’s only Developer available at the time. The app successfully managed to provide a platform for it’s users to register for upcoming events through a mobile-only website.


However the solution was not scalable as it lead to Developer having to manually modify code each time to create new events & gather data from an SQL database. This resulted in overwhelm for the developer and the churches event team. A lot of dependency was placed on the developer especially to retrieve data, design and develop new screens for the app.

The Developer expressed frustration of having to think of designing new event features and improvements for the next iteration of the design as well as executing on development, which was no easy task, especially with ambiguity present on the design side.

It was at that moment that the Developer who was a friend of mine invited me to redesign the app for her church. I was given the responsibility of redesigning the user and event admins screens.

As there was only the two of us on this software development project, I had to ensure that me and my friend had close collaboration from beginning to the end. It was from conducting stakeholder interviews with church administrators & user research with event attendees, that me and the Developer learned about the churches challenges as well as the design constraints of this project.


Initially the Developer was my main point of contact. They had a stronger understanding of the organisations needs compared to myself. I learned that I would to factor in distinct user groups for the event attendees side of the platform. This lead me to changing a text input field to a dropdown field for the event sign up screens to reduce time on task for example. Allowing users to state their designation within the youth campus ministry rather than enter it.

From speaking with stakeholders, I managed to gather that their app should not function like other event management apps in the market. The organisation needed analytics that were specific to each zone and each group (see the organisation's hierarchy below).

This structure was required so different leaders could see how each zone or group was performing in terms of registration & attendance for each event. Another design consideration was for this organisation's language & accessibility. The design required specific permissions and data to appear for different kinds of user groups.

Although the app has not yet launched, the redesigned solution received approval from the main stakeholders for both the user and admin interfaces. So it is yet to be built by the developer.

While the user-side issues had already been addressed by the developer, my contributions focused on refining secondary priorities, such as improving navigation and minimising errors in sign-ups. I still hope to measure metrics to confirm my efforts such as task completion rate and task error rate.

On the admin side, the church expressed high hopes for the designs ability to automate critical event management responsibilities in this redesign and removing the organisations dependency on the developer.

Although the app has not yet launched, the redesigned solution received approval from the main stakeholders for both the user and admin sides of the platform. The design is yet to be fully completed by the developer.

Since the primary issues of the user side of the platform had already been addressed by the developer, my contributions focused on refining secondary priorities, such as improving navigation and minimising errors in sign-ups which was a big problem for the developer and the church event attendees. In future, I still hope to measure metrics to confirm my efforts such as task completion rate and task error rate.

With the admin side, the church event administrators also expressed high hopes for the designs perceived ability to automate critical event management responsibilities in this redesign and removing the organisations heavy dependency on the developer.