CONTEXT
College Sauce is a social networking app designed “by students, for students,” started at UC Santa Barbara and serving over 10,000 college students. The application aims at getting students in the know of current events, on and off campus. Essentially, serving as a digital hub for university life, combining elements of a social calendar, messaging platform, and local guide into one student-centered application. As a real client of Cal Poly’s design agency, Iter8, we redesigned the mobile application in an eight-week timeframe.
PROBLEM
01
Visual Clutter & Inconsistency
The interface suffers from visual overload, inconsistent alignment, and spacing issues, creating a high cognitive load that makes it difficult to scan content.
02
Discovery & Navigation Friction
Users face significant barriers to finding content due to the absence of a global search bar, restrictive filtering logic, and imprecise map interactions.
03
Ambiguous System Feedback
The application fails to communicate system state effectively, lacking critical feedback loops such as loading states, error messages, or clear confirmations.
04
Functional & Personalization Gaps
Core usability is compromised by non-responsive elements and a lack of personalization options for user profiles.
SOLUTION
The project solution is a redesigned mobile application prototype, alongside a company brand revamp: logo, color palette, and mascots.
CLIENT RESEARCH
The first step in our methodology was to assess the health of the current application to serve as the foundation for our redesign strategy.
We conducted a comprehensive heuristic evaluation to identify existing errors within the interface, flagging inconsistencies in the design system and logic errors in the navigation.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Students currently rely on a patchwork of disconnected apps to manage their social lives so we analyzed competitors to understand how they handle things like verification and discovery. Our analysis revealed a clear gap: while each competitor solves one specific problem, none offered a more unified ecosystem for the entire student experience.
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH & SURVEY
To gain an understanding of how college students find, engage, and connect through events, we sent out a Google Survey.
Our research focused on three main areas:
Event preferences: What type of events students are most interested in
Event discovery & Search Methods: How they currently find events and what tools they want
Social connectivity: How they connect with other students before or after an events
QUANTITATIVE FINDINGS
Main findings:
Students prefer event preferences such as live performances, social events, and hobby-based activities
They want filters, personalized recommendations, and popularity indicators to find events
Users are looking for calendar integration and reminders to keep track of events
Most connect through text & social media
Implementation:
Enhanced filtering (by category, time, price, color-coded, multi-tagging)
Event popularity indicators (friends in attendance, marker)
Calendar similarity and live status
Social features, profiles, chats, networking)
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH & INTERVIEWS FINDINGS
We additionally conducted 11 face-to-face user interviews to understand how college students find out about and engage with events on and off campus
We focused on providing us insights on the pain points and challenges students face when choosing events and the dynamics of connecting with peers at social events.
AFFINITY MAPPING
After transcribing the interviews, we deconstructed the results and interview feedback into individual data or pain points and clustered them to find possible patterns.
From this, we developed new features to fill user experience gaps.
User Personas
In analyzing user research and affinity mapping, I developed four main user personas that best embodied the target audience’s goals and frustrations.
Problem Statement & How Might We
User flow: old vs new
To drive user acquisition and promote user-generated content, we completely restructured the information architecture, adding new features to promote trust and discoverability.
Our client and user research and audit revealed possibly why the original user flow often led to dead ends: users would open the app, fail to find relevant content, and leave. The Google survey and user interviews confirmed why: the experience was filled with barriers to connection and the app needs to be map-centric, making events and interactions primarily discovered through the map. Additionally, students feel hesitant to commit to events without social proof, struggling to discover relevant communities, and lacking the tools to build a trustworthy and personalized digital identity.
Old USER FLOW
New USER FLOW
KEY CHANGES
LOW FIDELITY
As a team we wanted to centralize the map as the main landing point for a hub of events, mainly highlighting upcoming ones. Additionally, we determined a bright color palette would be ideal for this product concept.
After competitive analysis, I thought of a pull up catalog to list the rest of the events, listed by categories and with horizontal scrolling can quickly view more events. I explored the idea of a "hot" marker or a hot map for areas where theres a high number of large social gatherings. With our qualitative research results, I expanded filters to be personalizable and created the structure of a listed version of upcoming events, instead of the map. Additionally, using my experience with the Disability Resource Center at Cal Poly, I introduced the idea of accessibility filters. The information hierarchy and design of the event card was done by another designer, I added the interaction element.
MID FIDELITY
Beginning this phase, copy was written and images were placed.
During this phase, I tested different ways to look up users, the use of icons, and informations hierarchy of cards. As well, my project managers determined the tag colors, I implemented these as the quick tags for event category to preview upcoming events. Further, the medium event card for the list format was created with a clearer snapshot of the event.
BRANDING & DESIGN SYSTEM
We developed a design system based on our research insights and client input.
User interviews revealed that many found the original branding uninspired and outdated. To address this, we introduced a bright, fresh, and inspiring color palette that enhances engagement and visual appeal.
FINAL SCREENS
Live Explore Map
Location based explore page, to learn where events will take place with a pull up catalog of categorized events. Access filters, main tags, and search bar in one-click.
List View of Events
Switch to a calendar list view of events. To quickly scan event details such as time, location, mutual friends in attending, and category.
Expanded Filters
Find specific upcoming events by price, date, location, popularity (RSVP Rate), and accesibility parameters.
Sauce Map!
Get saucy and easily view hot areas. Find hot social events like parties concerts and other large gatherings.
REFLECTIONS
First time in a design agency.
Being my first time in the agency, it was my first time in a group project for a client. I had no clue what I was embarking on, however I learned a lot on how to communicate to my design leads and within a team. Being in the agency meant working with peers outside of my major as both design leads had graphic design backgrounds, emphasizing and highlighting the importance of different perspectives and skillsets.
The importance of proper layers and auto-layout.
Being one of my first serious projects in Figma, I was still learning how to use auto-layout and just how to generally design in Figma. When it came to prototyping, I had to redo certain layouts due to how improperly I grouped and auto-laid out elements. Therefore, after this project, I learned the importance of taking my time during the early stages of the design process to successfully set myself up for prototyping.
Learning how to design for a mobile application.
This was my first time designing for a mobile application, prior to this, I only had experience in designing for desktop. And I quickly realized how less white space there was to visualize and display information and therefore had to be strategic by using collapses and motion, in this case mostly horizontal scrolls. I learned how useful collapsing elements and icons can be to properly aid users in completing the end goal: finding events or getting saucy!
THE FUTURE
Testimony from Sarah Boggs, CEO of College Sauce
“The Cal Poly Iter8 team is nothing short of amazing. My company, ‘College Sauce’ was chosen to be one of their quarter long design projects and from the very first meeting, until the last, I was impressed with the professionalism, skills, creativity and commitment of the entire team. They did a copious amount of work in a relatively short amount of time and delivered a completely re-branded and redesigned app at the end of the engagement. They were engaged, thoughtful, and they delivered! I will be using their designs as we re-brand and add features to our app. If you have the opportunity to use the services iter8 provides, don’t pass it up. If you are interested in any of these team members as employees, don’t hesitate to hire them. They have proven to be professional designers with top notch skills.”
