Meco
Meco is a project management mobile app meant for smaller, very collaborative groups that aims to resolve common issues in group work.
Project Timeline
July 2020 - August 2020 • 2 months
Project Type
Personal Project • Group Project
July 2020 - August 2020 • 2 months
Project Type
Personal Project • Group Project
Problem
Group projects can be difficult, especially with larger numbers and people that you might not have previously worked with, such as school projects. Various issues can arise in these group settings, with some common ones below, ultimately making group projects dreadful and cause lack of motivation to work on and complete projects.
Inspiration
Throughout my team’s experience with high school and university projects, we’ve found ourselves to get frustrated and anxious when there’s lack of collective clarity. We also found it inconvenient when there were multiple different platforms being used to communicate and collaborate. We wonder if there could be a more streamline process to group work.
Design Challenge
How might we design a solution that solves the negative experiences that arise in group work and in collaboration?
Goal
Our goal is to make group work less of a hassle by creating a solution to relieve the difficulties of collaborating with other people. Our solution would save people from frustration, letting them complete group tasks efficiently.
Constraints
The solution should be a mobile platform for quick and convenient access, as well as target small groups of 10 or less as group projects, particularly school projects from our personal experiences, do not exceed more than 10 people.
Project Responsibilities
While we all played an equal role in both the research and the design of the solution, we decided to equally split the responsibilities of the pages, in which I worked on the onboarding and chats sections.
Solution
The solution is a mobile app that irons out the struggles of group work. We wanted to bring communication and file sharing to a centralized space as our research showed us how important these were. The solution features a homepage of assigned tasks and upcoming meetings, a shared calendar for meant for meetings and project milestones, a chat page for communication, and a storage page for shared files.
Easy Onboarding
Access new workspaces by requesting a 6-digit code from the workspace administrator. Once that’s done, it’s time for collaboration.
Team & Direct Chat
Conveniently toggle to access team and direct messages. Being able to keep all chats in one area makes it more convenient and easy to access.
Automatic Suggestions
Schedule meetings quickly with automated events. These suggestions can let users quickly create them to add to the group calendar.
File Sharing
Keep files organized by sharing files directly on your team’s space to make it faster and more convenient to access.
User Research
To get a better understanding of our target audience and their needs, we sent out a questionnaire to 14 university students of different programs.
We acknowledge that this is a small portion of people to survey and therefore could have created a bias in our overall responses.
Highlights from Questionnaire
Q: In your experience, rank the most frustrating issues that might arise in group work. 1 being the most frustrating, 5 being the least frustrating.
• General miscommunication
• Unequal contribution
• Colliding opinions
• Missing deadlines
• Scheduling conflicts
Q: Rank the organization methods that you find most effective in group work or collaboration. 1 being the most effective, 5 being the least effective.
• Ability to share files
• Shared calendar for meeting
• Messaging platform
• Folder spaces
• Notifications for deadlines
• Ability to share files
• Shared calendar for meeting
• Messaging platform
• Folder spaces
• Notifications for deadlines
Market Research
Our questionnaire revealed users’ top few platforms for both communication and file sharing, in which we wanted to highlight key and helpful components of each platform to consider in our final solution.
Information Architecture
Initial System Map
Trade-Offs/Revision
As a group, we realized that the pages and content could be more concise or simply unnecessary. For example, the vision board could only be of use to groups of certain programs such as design. It would likely not be needed in other types of projects. We also realized the importance of being able to join multiple groups at once, which we added in our revision.
As a group, we realized that the pages and content could be more concise or simply unnecessary. For example, the vision board could only be of use to groups of certain programs such as design. It would likely not be needed in other types of projects. We also realized the importance of being able to join multiple groups at once, which we added in our revision.
Final System Map
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Next Steps
We started off with the constraint creating a mobile solution, though as we were considering the problem space, we realized that an accompanying desktop platform would be helpful with file sharing as most potential users would work on larger monitors.
Final Takeaways
Our group had planned to conduct user interviews for both usability and to see if the app solved the problem statement, though due to the crunch on time, we were unable to perform testing. Had we gotten the chance, the outcome of our final product might be different.
What I Learned
This was my first group UX/UI project where I took part in the research and design. There was much to learn and it was a great experience. My group members and I were all of similar level of experience, though we found learning along the way engaging and enjoyable.