COLUMBIA MOSAIC 2023
Discovering the artistic community at Columbia University with Columbia Mosaic
ROLE Lead Designer, UX Researcher
TIME Oct - Dec 2023
TEAM Prentice Jones, Camille Naït-Abdesselam (Research & Design), Lucia Saignac (Development)
For our final project for my UI Design course, my team designed Columbia Mosaic, an artistic event discovery platform to promote and uphold the art community amongst the student body of Columbia University. The app keeps students in the know of artistic events occurring on campus, allowing them to discover and access events at the touch of a finger.
As the lead designer of this project, I established the overall interface layout and design and oversaw the user testing procedures.
Columbia Mosaic is a dynamic map that pinpoints the locations and details of all art-related events taking place on campus, simplifying the event discovery experience to allow students to better explore their artistic interests.
"The process for finding events takes a long time"
"I didn't even know there were art clubs here"
“For other art events, I just don't know where I would be looking"
We spoke to a group of students with varying levels of involvement in the arts at Columbia, ranging from students who were art organization leaders deeply invested in the community to students who were unfamiliar with the arts entirely. We asked them about their relationship with arts events, how they go about searching for events, and the challenges they face in their search.
We consolidated our quotes and learnings into an affinity diagram to extract three main insights that encapsulate the current experience of searching for artistic events.
LAYING DOWN THE GROUNDWORK
Our user interviews revealed that locating events can be challenging when students are unfamiliar with some locations of campus buildings.
Thus, we designed Mosaic as a dynamic map of all artistic events on campus to remove the initial obstacle of locating of events, creating a smoother and interactive, hands-on discovery experience.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Creating effective event cards that provide students with all necessary event information at first glance took some experimentation. Our goal was to find a balance between highlighting key event information and the platform's features without having the card look too cramped.
visual design
Our final round of iteration was for adding color and typography to the platform.
Drawing from Columbia’s Web Color Guide, I set the base color as a lighter hue of Columbia blue at #E9F5FE and developed an analogous color palette around the color.
design walkthrough
Students can toggle between a dynamic map view or list view to browse all current arts events taking place on campus.
The save event feature provides students with a convenient way to track events they are interested in, while the Google Calendar integration helps them stay committed and not forget event times.
The platform's filtering feature allows students to narrow down their event search based on their personal interests, minimizing the time and effort of discovering events.
Students who want to be more involved in the arts community can create a Mosaic account through their school email. The simple onboarding process allows student to input their interests and follow clubs to get personalized event recommendations and event updates from their favorite clubs.
I had so much fun my first time designing a platform from 0-1! In previous projects I dealt more with user research, but I was really able to practice my visual design skills through this project and learned how to think of design iteratively. I learned many design lessons, such as...
The challenge of organizing the event-card information taught me not to be afraid to experiment and be comfortable with imperfection. I would have never gotten to the "perfect". solution had I not tried out the other ideas I had!
Multiple rounds of feedback showed that as designers, our assumptions about the users don't always match the reality. Consistent check-ins proved to be incredibly valuable for better identifying user needs and thus creating a better product.
Mosaic originated from a desire to make students more aware of art events at Columbia. However, as we spoke to more students we learned that students don't just want to find more events, but desire to build community through shared artistic interest. In future iterations, I would incorporate a social aspect into the platform, allowing students to follow one another and see each other's activity to fulfill a greater desire for community.