UTogether
A smartphone application, facilitates short-term meetups for UT students
Many international students at UT want to make friends with other local students so they joined events host by International Student and Scholar Services(ISSS) or other organizations on campus. ISSS offers friendship program and PALS program which matches international students with Austin community for an intercultural exchange of customs and lifestyles. However, arranging strangers in meetings is challenging. A more streamlined app, one that specifically addresses the challenges of on-the-fly social events, could ease this audience’s troubles.
Members of the ISSS organizations, from the PALS program to the Friendship Program, will provide insight into match-making, public outreach, and other niches our social app could address. We arranged a meeting with ISSS coordinators to get more information about how their program works.
After the interview, we organized our notes, creating affinity maps and analyzing the result to be more clear about what the students and event host needs.
After defining the main functions, we start to sketch out a low fidelity paper prototype which is quick and easy for modifications.
After the finish of the app prototype design, I continued on the development of UTogether website, using nodejs and express framework. Although the website is still under development, it aims at sharing similiar features of it's app version.
