Study Link - Concept

During the user research portion of the design process, I looked at the ways college students form study groups. Many college students simply text their friends and ask if they’d like to study together. Others would make posts on social media. However, there are some college students who prefer to study by themselves. In designing Study Link, it was crucial to make all users (college students) feel welcomed and included, giving them equal availability to public study groups. I also wanted to make sure that the website was easy to use and navigate. Ensuring the user could effortlessly find study groups and search for classmates was crucial during testing.

The Study Link website needed to promote engagement, focus, and learning for students, therefore, unecessary features such as text or image posts that can easily become distractions, were omitted. The design also needed to be easy to use and intuitive, so effective navigation and icons were used to communicate the functionality and flow of the site. Being that college students spend time on various devices, Study Link needed to be responsive, so the website was designed to be viewed on any device.

During the usability study for the Study Link website I carefully noted the participants’ emotions and actions to determine which features of the website's design and user flow were great and which needed extra consideration to ensure users could accomplish their goals. After fixing the handful of issues that arose, the participants of the usability studies were pleased and felt they had effortlessly achieved what the given tasks.

Throughout the entire design process of Study Link I learned how to design a responsive website that achieved all of a user's needs, iterated on the site's features to greatly enhance the experience of users, and was able to really empathize with users having personally experienced their inability to find study partners online.