This piece was originally found in my college UX portfolio. It is up as a memento of earlier days

Greek Life Overview

Each year a new executive board is selected to run each Greek Chapter on campuses across the United States. They come in with many ideas with the primary obstacle of execution. Several tools are used to keep the Chapter in the know. Emphasis on several.

I was the primary digital product designer of this project. While each member of the team (whether business-minded or an engineer) contributed to the overall design via collaboration. I was charged in visualizing and leading the conversation.

Team Experience

My team and I originally worked together on the executive board for Theta Chi’s Eta Kappa Chapter at James Madison University during the 2015 calendar year. We have used our experiences in leading this type of organization in the pursuit of this project.

As-Is Approach

We consulted several heads of different organizations and Greek Chapters and found the majority of communication structures were based off of the following tools: text messages, email, Facebook Groups and GroupMe.

Industry Analysis

We analyzed the industry through Porters 5 Forces (seen below) to guide our direction. After the analysis it was clear we were set to leverage mobile computers as our primary platform.

User Funnel

In order to comply with a proper light-weight mobile focus (a contrast and differentiator to heavy-weight organizational applications such as Trello or Slack), a goal was derived for our digital product. A funnel to isolate important functions was derived as seen below:

Journey Map

Accounting for the application’s light-weight structure and simple information architecture, we mocked up a user journey map to aid in understanding the interactions a user would have with our application. A very early version is seen below:

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

With an understanding of the application’s purpose and how it was to be utilized, many low-fidelity wireframes were sketched. They would then arrive at the ‘kill squad’ and be dissected. About 20 iterations in, we landed on a generally favorable version that has since been further challenged in usability tests. One of our low-fidelity wireframe appears below:

Conclusion

With little detail on the ‘how’ above, what can be said is we are building upon principles of assumptive design to make thorough communication possible within one’s Greek organization with the smallest tool possible in favor of the ‘as-is’ triad of solutions. This will allow organizations to focus more on their brotherhood or sisterhoods and less on why Joe didn’t appear for Thursday’s social with sorority, Kappa Delta.