Columbia Virtual Campus
Lead design for a online college social and community platform for students to stay connected, active and aware during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
HOME
CREATIVE
YEAR
2020
ROLE
Design lead
Visual design
Product management
User research
TEAM
7 Junior designers
3 Product managers
10 Engineers
About the project
In direct response to the COVID-19 impact, we created Columbia Virtual Campus to re-build a sense of community, motivate students to find new purposes, and support students who are placed in difficult positions away from campus resources.
I was the design lead and mentor for a team of 7 junior designers.I lead user research, visual branding, and product design while working extensively with similarly sized engineering and marketing teams.
Pain points to opportunities
Planned for a semester timeline which didn’t match with the abrupt timing of COVID-19 and current product requirement of clubs hosting events on our platform.
There is an abundance of online resources but no way of sorting it or personalizing to a user’s own need.
Study Spaces was too vague and not thoroughly thought out to be useful for users. Several loose ends came up including security measures, user accounts, and community rules enforcement.
The target audience is college students, and so both desktop and mobile views should be prioritized to accommodate their fast paced lifestyle.
From the identified pain points, we focused on the opportunities of developing the following 3 feature pages:
VIRTUAL STUDENT EVENTS
Connect students remotely through campus events and encouraging them to host their own more casually.
ONLINE RESOURCES
Find specific interests resources ranging from Columbia news, career development, social awareness and financial aid.
BLM MENTORSHIP
Highlight accountability and accessibility through mentorship with Columbia students while donating to BLM programs.
Success tracking
An example of quantitative success tracking on the BLM Mentorship page over the first month.
Mentors.
Mentees.
Donated.
Total traffic.
New unique visits.
Social media traffic.
Learnings
Leadership: Being an entirely student led initiative meant I had to learn to be a Design Lead, create a new brand, and mentor fellow designers extremely rapidly.
Design driven: Originally, CVC was a primarily engineering focused project - becoming an equal at the table proved a challenge but my perspectives on iterative design and MVP goals provided very fruitful.
Communication: I constantly communicated with engineering leads, program managers, and social outreach to ensure consistency with our goal and promote our product effectively.