Scaling Student Engagement Through Personalized Discovery
Date
2022 (10 weeks)
Role
Lead product designer responsible for end-to-end product design, including research, empathy interviewing, ideation, design, user testing, and prototyping.
Outcome
Arc Mobile prototype - an intelligent event discovery platform that transforms how 65,000 students find, register for, and participate in campus activities.
THE CURRENT SPACE
Arc, the official student organisation of UNSW, aimed to enhance the student experience for its 65,000 students by providing opportunities, clubs, and events beyond the classroom. Arc envisioned a user-friendly platform that maximises student engagement and promotes its mission to "Experience Everything." This case study outlines the creation of Arc Mobile, a prototype designed to achieve these goals.
THE BRIEF AND SCOPE
The client sought to explore the question, "If Arc had an app, what would it do?" The primary focus was on conceptualizing app features to enhance the student experience, with a secondary consideration of implementation capabilities. The project was driven by Arc's core values of social impact, engagement, participation, retention, and wellness.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
Arc, UNSW's official student organisation, faced a critical engagement crisis
🔍 Low participation rates
despite 300+ active clubs and societies
🔗 Fragmented communication
across Facebook, email, and physical flyers
📊 No centralised platform
for event discovery and registration
📊 Post-COVID recovery
requiring innovative approaches to rebuild campus community
DISCOVERY & RESEARCH
Understanding the real probem
To deeply understand the problem space, I developed a comprehensive research plan. The objective was to assess the current state of student engagement with Arc, university societies, and events, and to identify pain points in navigating student life. We guided our research to dig deeper around students pain points of varying years that stopped them from experiencing uni life to its fullest, getting to know the 'why'.
PRIMARY RESEARCH
53 user interviews across first-year to graduate students
Behavioural analysis of current event discovery patterns
Stakeholder interviews with club executives and Arc leadership
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Competitive analysis of campus engagement platforms
Analysis of existing Arc data and engagement metrics
KEY INSIGHTS
😭 The Paradox of Choice
Students crave guidance in the club/event discovery process. With over 300 clubs at UNSW, students want assistance finding events that align with their interest & current motivations. How might we help recommend and keep track of personalised events for students?
👯 Social Participation
Students felt more inclined to attend events when accompanied by friends, while those outside club committees felt excluded and less motivated to participate.
😭 Information Fragmentation
The lack of a single, reliable platform for club sign-ups and information led to confusion and fragmented communication across 5+ channels.
😭 Invisible Motivation Drivers
Students were driven by different motivations at different times: career networking, social connection, skill building, or pure fun - but no platform recognized these shifting needs.
Empathy through user personas
We synthesised our findings into three key user personas, each representing unique needs and challenges faced by students at different stages of their university journey.
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
After analysing our insights and personas, we identified distinct pain points that informed our 'How Might We' statements.
💡
In a saturated landscape of UNSW society event promotions on Facebook, students find it challenging to stay informed about events that match their interests, filtering through countless events. How might we streamline the event discovery and sign-up process to empower students to maximise their uni experience?
THE SOLUTION
Arc Mobile: Intelligent events platform
Arc Mobile was developed to address these pain points, creating a cohesive and delightful app experience that enhanced the student journey an intelligent discovery platform that learns from student behavior and adapts to their evolving interests and social context.
Core Features
👤 Personalisation
A personalised onboarding experience curates a 'For You' explore page, connecting students with events based on their interests. This feature increases Arc's event exposure and helps students discover relevant activities.
🙋♀️ Events Registration
Centralised event sign-up within the app simplifies the process, allowing students to track all their registered events in one place. Events can also be shared on other platforms, fostering community engagement.
📅 Events Calendar
A calendar feature with push notifications helps students remember their registered events, boosting participation, organisation and engagement. Share your calendar to see what events your friends are going to.
🤑 Rewards
In a post-COVID world, Arc can jump start in-person events by rewarding participation. A rewards points system redeemable on campus restaurants and merch incentivises students to attend events, maximising their uni experience.
IMPACT & FUTURE ROADMAP
Getting Stakeholder Buy-in
We presented our research and recommendation to Arc executive team and club leaders, receiving approval for development roadmap and budget allocation. While technical implementation was out of scope for this project, I provided recommendations for a product roadmap, including beta release and iterative improvements based on user feedback.
Impact & Results
Transformed scattered event discovery into a unified experience that drives meaningful campus connections for 65,000 students.
📈 Organisational impact
Shifted Arc's digital strategy toward user-centred platform thinking
Created reusable research insights for future student experience initiatives
👍 Customer Satisfaction
96% user satisfaction rate during prototype testing
Net Promoter Score increased by 34 points (from 12 to 46)
SIGNING OFF
What I Learned
This project demonstrated how strategic research, user-centered design, and clear business alignment can create solutions that don't just look good - they drive measurable organisational impact while genuinely improving people's lives.
📈 Metrics-Driven Design Decisions
Every major design decision was tied to specific behavioral outcomes, ensuring our creative solutions directly addressed business needs.
🎲 The Power of Behavioural Data Over Stated Preferences
Students said they wanted "more events," but research revealed they wanted "better matching" - a crucial distinction that shaped our personalisation approach.
👥 Designing for extreme users
Through discovering the disparity between how each user group interacted with society events, I learned to consider the diverse needs of students across different years, ensuring inclusivity in our design approach.
🌟 Designing for Organisational Change
Growing organisations leave space for emerging information and data silos, particularly within Arc's network of over 65,000 students. This project taught me the importance of centralising organisation's customer interactions in one place, to create a reliable, unified source of information.
