Fishtank
Find your School* at School!
UX/UI & Mobile Design
*School of fish - A group of fish swimming together.
We wanted to mimic what nature intended and create an environment for team bonding and coordination. Hence, Fishtank created a platform where students can find their crowd.
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Challenges
Challenge 1: Bridging the Social Gap
Finding their "school" can be a daunting and isolating experience for many students. Fishtank is our way to a seamless and personalized experience to ensure students find the perfect fit with their chosen events.
Challenge 2: Personalizing the School Search
Every student has unique needs. Our challenge is to create a system that allows students to personalize their search, find matching ones with friends, and filter through preferred recommendations while maintaining a user-friendly platform.
Challenge 3: Organizing your own Thriving Community
Finding your "school" is more than just the events. Fishtank needs to foster connection by encouraging active participation within the app. Allowing students to connect, chat, and build a strong community with their peers before stepping on campus.
Empathizing
Seeing how we're students doing this project, we had to look internally. At CSUF, our university is marked as one of California's most socially dead campuses. We looked into what makes a campus so isolating and how past attempts have failed to gather traction.
Ideating
After reflecting for 30 minutes, we've experienced how clubs would rise and fall and discord servers would be abandoned after two or three attempts. We wanted to create a place where events didn't have to relate to each other, where students didn't need to stay in their major or experiences to try something new.
Problem Validation
Understanding the concerns for event hosters and event goers being ghosted by their counterpart, we ensured a chat announcement to allow communication between all parties.
Additionally, to bolster student-led events, we created communities for clubs and regular organizers to reproduce repeatable events with location, details, and attendee list.
User Personas
Playing the role of organizers, we track club leadership, and organizations spend most of their announcements with events and limited information and updates till the day of. With our implementation of direct messaging and attendee lists, we list all details to those interested.
User Flow
From the start-up, we wanted users to find their crowd while recommending similar topics. Fishtank aims to find hobbies you align with and introduce clubs that connect you with others who have the same idea. Adding friends or meeting them throughout events is easy with direct messaging between friends and organizers.
Incorporating frequent event updates, messaging, and direct organizing for users and organizers, Fishtank creates a linear process to get you to your next event. When you're ready, attend events both in person or virtually.
Key Insights & Reflection
The premise of Fishtank connecting users while bringing the usability of multiple apps into a linear package was fascinating yet ambitious. In this ambition, we understood refining the details of a concept this complex would be detrimental considering the pressure of time.
However, considering how important of a tool this can be for organizers, we wanted to utilize this pain point and help streamline the process of event planning.
In receiving feedback from our judges, we were reminded to focus on both sides of the user base, not only organizers. Though direct messaging and live updates benefit a successful app, creating features like a calendar or linking other tools like Google or Monday.com would help users migrate from platform to platform.
Designing the interface, we were reminded to iterate strategically and reevaluate the user personas away from an event management perspective.
