partiful campus
/event discovery to explore belonging/
project summary
Over the course of two days, I collaborated in a team of three to design a feature to be added to the Partiful app, that addressed the following goal: event discovery for college students. We conducted needfinding interviews and rapid prototyping. Finally, we created our feature using Figma and presented to a Partiful representative. We were then awarded first place.
project details
Project Type: Stanford Designathon Project
Role: Designer, User Researcher
Dates: May 10 - May 11, 2025
Tools: Figma
Deliverables: Figma
Impact: 1st Place Partiful Winner
problem
Partiful has extensive features for creating, hosting, and joining events between close to medium tie connections. But what about events hosted by complete strangers? How can Partiful allow for event discovery?
solution
partiful campus is an interactive college campus map that easily highlight current events and its vibe/energy level/people attending. Students can now easily browse through events happening in real time.
final product
process
based on the Stanford d.school design process
01 - empathize
We conducted eighteen needfinding interviews (participants all college aged students) regarding their college social life experiences. How do you discover events? What makes you want to go to a function? What deters you? We set out to answer these questions and more. Through these interviews, we were able to create a compiled Empathy Map for all the interviewees to better understand the "what" and "why" of their actions/statements.
02 - define
We synthesized the outcomes by creating a Point of View (POV) and How Might We (HMW) statements. We found that social context is everything. Lonely or hesitant students don’t just want to know what is happening - they need to know who’s going, how much energy it’ll take, and whether they’ll belong. We also found that students were overwhelmed by the multitude of event channels (word-of-mouth, emails, social media, etc.)
Compiled Empathy Map and Key Insights
03 - ideate
After defining a clear problem statement, we set out to ideate solutions by coming up with various diverse realizations and crazy 8 sketches. We realized that we wanted our feature to have lots of visuals while maintaining Partiful's brand identity.
Ideation Methods: Diverse Realizations & Crazy 8s Sketches
Initial Sketches of Partiful Campus
04 - prototype
We settled on a "map of events" and set out to create a low-fidelity paper prototype for testing. We then created our final medium-fidelity prototype using Figma (as the Designathon only accepted a medium fidelity prototype).
Low-Fidelity Paper Prototype
05 - test
Given the short timespan, we were only able to conduct usability test using our paper prototype with one outside participant. From this test, we found that the map was a good balance between aesthetics and geographical info, the different types of houses were easy to understand; however, they wanted a way to see more personalized insights.
House Design
In order to quickly and effectively communicate all of these different event attributes, we use house visuals and additional info in the event description. The color of the house represents the type of event (green = chill; pink = party; purple = educational; blue = service). The lights represent if the event is happening in the moment. Towards the top of the house, you'll be able to see icons of the people attending and an emoji representation of the event!
House Design Key