The background

Indonesia's students are highly interested in participating in various kinds of activities. Such as webinars, workshops, competitions, and others. And in this pandemic period, many students seek activities to fill their spare time. The government also supports it by providing many online and offline activities, such as the Kampus Merdeka, Kampus Mengajar, Bangkit, and others. However, there are still many of them who do not know and have limited information about ongoing activities. Thus, information about current activities is not accessible to many students.

Design Process

In the application development process, I use the Design Thinking method to help identify existing problems and validate my solutions. However, before starting to empathize with the user, I first did desk research (competitive analysis) as a guide to start the research stage.

Competitive Analysis

Before empathizing with users, I did a competitive analysis to have enough insights to start research. In order to understand what I will build, I analyzed the SejutaCita, Eventbrite, and Loket.com applications. Here are the results I got when doing a competitive analysis:

• There are still many competitors who do not maximize the Home page well, even though the Home is a page where users can explore what features are in the application.
• Too much information is displayed on the Rewards page, so the user's initial goal is to see the nominal reward that should be less highlighted
• Insights regarding an event registration can be improvised according to the application's needs.
• Event organizers cannot be contacted about their events.
• Tagging is good enough to distinguish event categories
• Competitors don't provide information if the internet is down, so the users will blame the app itself and give lousy feedback

Prepare & Conduct Research

The first step in conducting research is to develop a research plan to ensure the results obtained are in line with what was intended and that there is clear scope for the research to not expand.

Interviews were conducted with five men & women, aged > 21 years, living in the province of East Java, and often participating in student activities such as competitions, webinars, etc.

Synthesize Research Result

Results of the interview were summarized using Miro's card sorting method based on insight and journey. You can access Miro through the link here.

The Insights

After clustering the existing raw insights, I got some final insights:

• Respondents are happy to participate in activities if invited by their friends
• Respondents are happy to find out what are the benefits of participating in an activity
• Respondents like to do an activity related to student affairs
• Respondents prefer to pay for activity using m-banking and e-wallet
• Respondents are happy to complete a challenge to get a reward
• And others.

User Journey

There are five journeys in the defined journey, namely the journey when (1) Looking for information, (2) Obtaining information, (3) Studying requirements, (4) Registering, and (5) Participating in activities.

Pain Points

As a result of the final insights, here are some pain points I identified:

• Respondents find it challenging to get information about the activities they are interested in
• Respondents do not know the benefits of the activities to be joined
• Information about activities on social media is too crowded, and there is no particular platform to gain the specific event information
• Lack of relationships owned by respondents
• Respondents do not know the format if they want to hold an activity
• Respondents find it challenging to meet the requirements for participating in an action of interest
• Respondents have problems with internet connection and quota
• Respondents have difficulty contacting the event organizer
• Respondents have difficulty finding activities that are related to something they are interested in
• Respondents often forget if the activity they are participating in has started

Ideation

I develop ideas using the Miro application by considering the respondents' pain points. Access the Ideate section here.

Provide update & detailed information

Missing information often occurs due to a lack of transparency from the organizers, so when organizers want to create events through the application, they are required to include descriptions, benefits, times, and others.

Provide a template format

Many students are confused when they want to create or spread their events. Therefore, a structured template was created so that they could easily share this information with the public.

Provide access to contact the event organizer

The difficulty of contacting event organizers is one of the obstacles for students to participate in activities

Provide recommendations for related activities

Students have difficulty finding activities according to the activities they are interested in.

Provide a calendar with date markings

Students often forget about some of the events they have registered, so a visual reminder of when an activity is held is needed.

Give challenges with discounts, funds, and data package

Students need encouragement so that they are moved and excited to do something. Therefore, gamification is applied so that many students participate in using the application.

Prototype

The purpose of prototyping is to evaluate product flow and test directly with users. Access the prototype above.

Test

The documentation from the tests is being finalized for publication. But you can see the results report on the Maze platform here.