UOMO
Prompt
This is a project for a McMaster University design hackathon, the design prompt is “The user is unfamiliar with college after high school struggling with a different lifestyle, and is finding the balance between social and school life”. The user feels “FOMO” and insecurity from people who have quickly fit into the new life. For expand the user’s social life, the user also needs to work out the casual speaking words and sentence.
Our team’s goal is simple yet highly personal - building and improving people’s sociability and mental health hygiene. Delegating tasks by strengths, we created the end-to-end experiences of features:
Daily Planner
Discovering Hot Spots, Hangouts Spots and Career Services
Free Ideation Playground
Language Learning Assistance
Background
The target user currently struggles with...
The available college social mobile applications experience can be fragmented and confusing, as popularized among the school mobile app, Meetup and Notion. While most students rely on it to provide academic planning, information about campus events, services, and resources, including career services, it often serves outdated content, limited customization, and lacks student Involvement.
This leaves student bodies to outsource other applications and platforms with scattered information that most find very time consuming and the accuracy of the information pool uncertain.
Meet Up
My New School App
Notion Planner
💡
How Might We...
design a user-friendly platform that helps users manage FOMO and social anxiety, while offering tools to build communication skills and improve time management?
Opportunities
UOMO leverages an all-in-one solution system for student social service community engagement. Differing from other platforms, UOMO aims to support student’s college campus needs with a more holistic engaging experience by having integrated information resources and social engagements.
UOMO addresses the challenge of helping students seamlessly adapt to college life in unfamiliar environments. It tackles issues like fear of missing out, lack of connection, and the social gap between Gen-Z and Millennials. By fostering an engaging and inclusive student community, UOMO creates opportunities for better integration, informed decision-making, and meaningful social experiences.
Research
User Interview
conducted 15 interviews with most international student for an inclusive pool feedback.
Time Management
Can you describe your typical daily routine during the semester?
How do you currently plan and keep track of important dates, assignments, exams, and deadlines?
What tools or methods do you use to stay organized?
Culture Adjustment
How do you discover and stay updated on social events, clubs, and organizations on campus?
Have you used any social resources platforms for college-related networking and event discovery?
...
Social Network
Can you describe your experience with college career services?
What frustrations have you encountered when seeking guidance through your college’s career services?
...
🧑🤝🧑 Engaging Social Network
Students want to stay socially relevant and connected. They’re motivated to create and grow their own communities through features that are creative, gamified, and encourage a sense of belonging.
🧭 Access to Resources
Students seek quick access to relevant local resources—including campus services, trending spots, and cultural activities—but often struggle to find centralized, trustworthy information.
✅ Effective Task Tracking Flow
Students face challenges in building and managing schedules. They need better tools to plan time, categorize tasks, and track workload without added complexity.
💼 Seamless Career Learning & Exploration
Many students are unfamiliar with how to navigate school-based career resources or the job market. They actively look for mentorship, job guidance, and easy access to relevant career opportunities.
Market Analysis
Analyzing gaps in leading platforms to uncover missed opportunities in student lifestyle support
Most leading apps serve isolated needs but overlook the unique challenges of student life. This gap reveals an opportunity to design a more integrated, student-centered solution.
Apps are too disconnected
No single app covers school, social life, and mental well-being together.
Not made for students
Current platforms don’t address college students' unique needs.
Big design opportunity
There’s room to build one tool that helps students manage time, connect socially, and feel supported.
Persona
Getting to know our users and what they truly need
Most leading apps serve isolated needs but overlook the unique challenges of student life. This gap reveals an opportunity to design a more integrated, student-centered solution.
Sarah, 18
New York, NY
Freshman Uni Student
Single
INTP (MBTI)
Pain Points
Learning English as a secondary language, Sarah is unfamiliar with casual speaking terminology.
Allocating time for a social life, physical activity, extra-curriculars, academic studies, personal care is hard.
Feeling FOMO’ (fear of missing out) and insecurity from those around them who have quickly adapted to the new life.
Sarah is often in a rush for school work and can’t spend much time on an organizing app.
Needs
A tool helps her organize her life schedule.
Resources of school life, places for hanging out, job opportunities.
A way to build new network.
Background
Sarah is transitioning into post-secondary school from high-school and isn’t quite sure on how to tackle a completely different lifestyle away from home, Cape Town, South Africa.
She felt lost when she arrived at the new school and as an international student, she is eager to learn about the new environments, culture and the people around her.
Goal
Make new friends.
Need to organize and planning staff for the transition.
Learn more casual speaking English.
Have common topic with her peers.
Empathy Map
We break down the responses from the interviews and set from persona’s identity to mocked up a general user’s empathy map. This helped us to map out our potential audience having a better understanding of their reasons behind actions.
Product Thinking
Through our research, we identified the following necessary features to address the pain points of freshman college students.
Platform
A user-friendly platform that informs students about activities outside of school.
Tool
A tool that helps students balance their school and personal life for better time management.
Adaptive Learning
A resource that provides guidance on career paths.
Design Exploration
Because we are in the designarathon, so we did fast iteration…
Once we mapped out the information architecture’s structure, we gained a better comprehension of our objectives. This enabled us to refine our design iteratively before advancing to the final development phase. Throughout this journey, we clarified the user flows and did exploration and assessment of various design blueprints, consolidating critical components in the most user-friendly ways.
Visual Identity
Uomo’s color palette was chosen to embody a sense of power and boldness. The combination of orange and black creates an aesthetic reminiscent of a sunrise in the dark, instilling a sense of hope for users to seamlessly integrate into their social lives and confidently navigate through their new environment.
Design
We combined the strongest aspects of each iteration to create a strong collective visuals
01
Campus Connect
A unified platform for hot spots, events, and job opportunities, with a synced Google Calendar for easy access and planning.
02
Balance Your School Life with Ease
Organize daily tasks and visually distinguish activities with color-coded scheduling. Customize your calendar's theme, colors, and logo for a personalized experience.
03
Career Resources for Freshmen
Uomo provides workshops, job opportunities, and a formal language dictionary designed to support college freshmen learning English as a second language in navigating the job market and enhancing their professional skills.
04
Event Playground
Discover random events when feeling bored or indecisive. Connect and network with others while tracking your achievements, all in one engaging platform.
Looking Forward
Prioritizing User Experience Over Aesthetics
Initially focusing on aesthetics before user research impacted our design thinking. We realized too late that prioritizing user experience first leads to more effective and user-centered designs.
Reflection
The Power of Communication
Collaborative brainstorming helped our group explore unique ideas, challenge perspectives, and develop innovative approaches by building on each other’s thoughts.
Collaborative Structure: Strength in Roles
Clear role assignments allowed each team member to utilize their strengths, fostering efficient and effective design decision-making.