Campus

Battling Student Isolation During a Global Pandemic

Personal project started during COVID-19 lockdown with two college friends — one designer, one engineer. We built Campus to help students find their communities when campuses went dark.

Date 2021–2022

Role Lead Designer and Front End Engineer

Tools

FigmaPostgreSQLReactReact Native

Responsibilities

Desktop DesignDesktop ProgrammingMarketingMobile DesignMobile ProgrammingUser Research

Problem Statement

Club Discoverability Suffered during Covid

While building software fascinated me, it was why we should build it that really captured my interest.

User Research and Analysis

How do students find their fit?

In college I deepened my knowledge of computers and their impacts on people through a specialty program that allowed me to blend computer science, graphic design, psychology, entrepreneurship, and a healthy dose of ethics. While building software fascinated me, it was why we should build it that really captured my interest.

Serendipity is Key

During interviews we often asked students to tell us about a club that they are highly involved in and to walk us through how they first discovered it. In all these stories we saw that rarely did the student plan to join the club or get involved. They may have been dragged to a meeting by a friend they wanted to get closer with, or accidentally stumbled across an event when heading home from the library.

Club Fairs Don't Fit Student Journeys

The dominant way that clubs are discovered — aside from serendipitously — is the club fair. At my school, and many others, this occurs two weeks into the fall semester and that's it. While a great kickstart, it doesn't reflect the growing needs of students, especially freshmen who are often still finding their footing when the fair rolls around.

Recruitment Challenges All

While clubs vary greatly in size, attendance expectations, event frequency, and purpose — all group leaders agreed their community would be stronger if more students could find it easily. Yet they felt the tools provided to reach new members were simply not enough.

The Club Fair Problem in Depth

The largest issue is that the club fair is a one-time event, which doesn’t account for the reality that many students will join and quit multiple clubs before finding their home.

Speaking from experience, my first semester freshman year was a rollercoaster of joining and leaving clubs until I found my fit just as second semester rolled around. But I never stopped searching for more groups and activities to enrich my experience.

Outcomes and Impact

Virtual Club Fair with 200+ Clubs

We officially launched the app during the height of the pandemic, where all in-person activities were prohibited at my school and the club fair had been cancelled for the first time since it began. Our student engagement office recognized the harm this would do — so we worked in partnership with them to design and run a virtual club fair through our app, which would later serve as an activity hub for continual discovery.

Virtual Club Fair, Spring 2021

The virtual club fair attracted 1,600+ concurrent users — roughly one-fifth of my school’s population — and served as the app’s onboarding moment, teaching students how to engage with the platform while giving clubs a stage during their most critical recruitment period.

Virtual Club Fair Created Engaged Users

The virtual club fair served as our onboarding. Not only did it attract 1,600+ concurrent users but it taught those users how to engage with the app. Alongside the fair we ran a livestream that let students and club leaders interact in a memorable way, even though in-person activities were prohibited.

Zoom Fatigue is Real

As the pandemic wore on, students grew exhausted by screen-based interaction. Even our most engaged users showed declining session lengths. Understanding this fatigue became critical to designing features that felt energizing rather than draining.

Social Needs Change Quickly During a Pandemic

As feelings of isolation and FOMO grew, many students looked toward unofficial — and riskier — ways to fulfill social needs. While we tried to offer a safe alternative, the value of clubs that could only host virtual events was ultimately not enough to satisfy users as the pandemic wore on.

A Lesson in Speed

While we had many ideas to mitigate these forces, it was often hard to roll them out quickly enough to keep up with the ever-changing needs of students — as we each had our own studies to tend to.

This taught me one of my most enduring lessons: the pace of product development must match the pace of your users’ lives, especially when external forces are reshaping those lives as rapidly as a global pandemic.