Hi, I'm Paris.

I'm a UX designer that wants to make life just a bit easier.currently based in San Diego, CA

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Background

In classrooms, students have a hard time building friendships, communicating, and staying motivated. AskClass aims to make a relationship-based classroom OS so that students can build social and emotional skills.

Challenge

Since this is a design sprint held by AskClass, we were given the task to create a solution that improves the collaboration process in the classroom.

"How might we help college students experience better collaboration in their team projects?"

Research

Keeping in mind AskClass's mission, we started by interviewing several San Jose State University professors to learn more about them, the class, and about what classroom collaboration problems they might be struggling with.

- What class do you teach?
- What percent of grade goes to team projects/participation?
- What works well in group assignments?
- How do you form teams?
- Any pain points with team projects?

Results & Pain Points
Professors...
- dedicated anywhere from 30-75% of the total grade to group work and participation.
- have existing ways to create teams.
- have existing ways to check group progress.
- were also easily able to inform team of roles and responsibilities.
- struggled to produce balanced teams.
- struggled to produce teams for bigger classes

Identifying the Problem

Professors struggled to group students in an efficient and effective manner.

Brainstorming & Solution

"How might we help college students experience better collaboration in their team projects?"

To answer this question, our team brainstormed a couple of concepts. This included resolving in-group conflicts, a peer evaluation rating, and an integrated filtering system.

Our group decided to focus on the issue of grouping students, especially due to larger classes.

"How might we make the grouping process easier?"

On WHAT to group students by, a more relationship based choice would be based on personal questions given by a survey. An example of the survey tests students would be grouped together or separately includes college major, hobbies, personality, interest, work style, availability, leadership, and (of course) more customizable options.

On HOW to group students, our team decided it would be optimal to allow the user to use a number of filters based on the survey tests, a random grouping function, and a more controlled manual grouping.

Prototyping

Paper Prototyping
I made the general flowchart below of the process a professor would experience when grouping teams and proposed it to the team. From there, we agreed on this process and started creating another iteration of this process.

In the next version, a more visual layout was used to highlight the three functions our concept offers-- filtered, manual, and random grouping. We also took more time on how a professor would interact with the students profiles in the grouping process. Bigger images of the students were used along with flagging options for easier recognition.

Due to the lack of time, we were unable to do more iterations and critiques and went ahead to start prototyping in Figma.

Digital Prototyping
Since only two of us knew how to generally use Figma at the time, prototyping was very slow, but I believe we demonstrated our concept.
We also followed branding guidelines including AskClass's color scheme.

Final Product

After finishing our prototype, we presented our matching method to the professors we had previously interviewed in contest with other teams. In the end, ours was voted the most popular by the professors and participants.

Takeaways

Overall, this project introduced me to the UX design process and taught me what it was really like to go through all of these steps. Setting clear goals, the research process, the designing, redesigning, and taking other people's ideas and feedback was very insightful in learning what it was like to design and work as a team.

I believe our biggest constraint was time, but from this, I got to learn how to make basic designs, how to prototype and implement a flowchart, and overall got more familiar on how to use Figma. This experience was very valuable to me as it was my gateway into the tools and thought process used in the design space.

Background

San Jose State University's Formula SAE Racing Team, Spartan Racing, is one of the best teams in California. Formula SAE is a yearly competition where college teams around the globe design, build, and race their cars in various categories.

The Problem

Spartan Racing is student run, and a large portion in being able to build amazing racecars is heavily dependent on funding and sponsors. With the website being outdated, hard to navigate, and I volunteered to redesign it.

The Process

Text

Takeaways

I am extremely passionate about x, so it was easy for me to work idk

Background

Today, YouTube is one of the biggest and most used streaming platforms available, but there are many obscure features you've probably never seen before, or even used.

I decided to start this project due to my own personal experience with the subscription notification feature on YouTube.

Problem

Located at the top right corner of the screen is a bell icon.

This feature's main function is to notify you about new videos from subscribed channels.

Instead, it is inefficient, linearly redundant, and uninteresting.

Research

To learn more about how people interacted with the notification system, I conducted surveys and interviews to find more specific pain points.

To the average viewer, it is a poorly optimized mess.
- Unwatched and watched videos are clumped together and hard to differentiate
- Scrolling is redundant and takes too much time
- Many feel overwhelmed by the amount of notifications, especially from irrelevant channels
- There isn't an easy way to navigate the notifications

To better design for the problems this function created, I created a user persona and journeymap. The goal of this was to understand and put myself in someone else's shoes to consider different perspectives, their thought process, and their emotions.

The Solution

"How can I improve the functionality of this feature? How can I make it more enjoyable?"

To make any improvements, I first drafted and brainstormed some solutions and how they might be implemented according to common pain points from the research.

The features I planned to implement were:
- Chronological sorting
- Search bar
- Ability to sort by video watch status (viewed/unviewed)
- Convenience of category creation
- Customized categories

Wireframing

With the features planned out and in mind, I created a rough wireframe. This gave me a rough idea of how functions would flow from frame to frame and the journey a user might take to get somewhere using my design.

Additionally, I wanted to practice a mobile version and play around with how some designs would be implemented differently.

Hi-Fi Prototype

Before starting on the prototypes, I challenged myself to follow YouTube's branding guidelines as best as possible. This meant making it look as similar as possible, following the same color schemes, structure, font, and small details (like icons) as closely as possible.

Takeaways

Since this project was started, I have learned so much in Figma just from doing things myself. I went out of my way to create what I envisioned and took the time to learn and understand how it functions and works.I got very familiar and comfortable with prototyping, making compoments, formatting, consistency, and all the fundamental basics needed for a functioning prototype in Figma.This personal project was invaluable as it has absolutely helped me familiarize myself in Figma and in practicing the design process. And it was fun.

Background

This game jam was hosted by the Video Game Development Club @ UCSD. All work was completed in a two week timespan.

Forming A Concept

Before our team began, it was important for us to acknowledge and take into account that none of us had previous experience using Unity or in game design.

Our team began by brainstorming a basic story for our game to take place in. We were heavily inspired by Tamagotchi, a game where the player is meant to take care and raise a digital pet. We collectively built upon a few ideas, adding story elements that would compliment game mechanics, but ultimately settled on a concept we could realistically achieve in a 2-week time span.

In the story of our game, the owner, who played with and took care of this digital pet as a kid, is now a teenage boy who has long forgotten about his childhood games. Wondering where its owner is, the digital pet sought out to try and find its owner.

It was decided we were going to design a 2D platformer with the goal of creating the most basic level. To divide up the work, we each assigned work we would be interested in.
Level design - Paris
Programming - Paris, Omar
Art - Vivian, Regine
Audio - Zachary

Design of Scenes

To illustrate the setting surrounding a 2D cutesy digital pet, I wanted to create a more clear vision of how to build the level. I wanted to base it on a cohesive room that matched the story, so I made a persona of the digital pet owner.

Collectively as a team, we brainstormed ideas by looking at 2000s themed teenager rooms and brainstormed what would be inside ours. Forming a persona of the owner made it easy to think of decor, theming, and the overall atmosphere world and background.

Eventually, after we discussed what objects to include, I started on the level design. I roughly mapped out where the player would travel in conjunction with the items we had thought of in the persona. For example, books, bowls, and the water bottle were used as platforms.

Initially, we had the idea of a character creation screen where it took the perspective of the owner. But we were not able to implement this screen due to time constraints.

I proposed that the player starts in a pixelated-style shoebox. Somewhere that was cohseive where typical childhood memiors, like wooden building blocks, set the scene and are elements the player can interact and jump on. When the player makes their way out of the shoebox, they are greeted with the room of their owner, who is a typical 2000s, music-loving, and messy teenager.

The background design of the shoebox and bedroom were cohesive. The design of the shoebox being very vibrant and innocent in contrast to the bedroom being dark, dull, and messy creates a fitting atmosphere for the story. It demonstrates the personality of a disorganized, and messy teenager and explains how the pet was long forgotten.

Programming
Learning Unity's language was a new experience. It consisted of a lot of new terms I simply needed to memorize, but programming a 2D platformer was very straightforward. It was the mechanics that were harder to implement.
I programmed the player's input for movement, all of the objects' hitboxes, some in game physics to set the pace of the game, and had the camera still or following the player according to the room.

Design Issues

When first implementing the backgrounds, I noticed that before the player even can move, there was no clear pathway. This made it very difficult to differentiate where they could and could not jump. An unclear objective and an undiscernable path takes away from an enjoyable experience.

I proposed to make the background a little more dull with less bold and muted colors to emphasize a more clear pathway for the player. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, the art team was unable to update the backgrounds for more clear platforms. In addition, the audio was unfinished so there were no sound effects or music playing when the player traversed the level.

Finished Product
By the end, our team had created a fully functioning level with an objective, basic character functions, seamless transitions, platforms, gravity, and themed visuals.

Takeaways

This project was super motivating and fun to work on! I had so much fun pitching ideas, forming concepts, and game mechanics with the rest of the group that it was hard to settle on an idea that could be realistically completed in 2 weeks. Time was a big constraint, but I believe we were able to put down our ideas and execute the most important ones.

Balancing schoolwork and this club's project on top of learning how to program using Unity was definitely a challenge to manage in a 2 week time span. Overall, I learned a lot about how all the different aspects of the game (visuals, mechanics, audio) contribute to create a fun experience.I now have a better understanding of the process of game design, but I moreso really enjoyed learning how each aspect is considered in programming everything we see and touch.

Hi, I'm Paris Tan and I'm originally from the Bay Area.

I was previously a student at San Jose State Unviersity studying Psychology with a minor in Interactive Design.

I'm now a transfer student at UC San Diego studying Cognitive Science with a Specialization in Design and Interaction.

The main reason I love UX design is that it can apply to anything. Physical or digital, auditory or visual, I believe user experience is an important factor when it comes to being able to use and enjoy a product.ps: my favorite design of all time has to be playing cards!

Outside of Figma, I love crocheting, hiking, learning and working on anything automotive, and finding new coffee spots. (send your favorites!)