UX Design & Gamification Project for Quitch

During my university coursework, I was tasked to redesign Quitch — a mobile self-learning app aimed at university students to help them revise and test their knowledge about what they've learnt in school through quizzes — to make it more engaging by using principles of user-centred design and gamification to guide the design process.

I was the leader in a team of four where I organised our weekly online meetings so that we could get our work done together since our module was conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown.

We conducted user research in the form of surveys and customer journey maps to find out what problems users encountered while using Quitch, and used affinity maps and user personas to find out what problems were the most important to fix. From synthesising our research, we determined that users:

1. had turned to self-learning applications like Quitch because they do not need to have a strong internet connection to use them and they can revise their subjects any time they want
2. were unmotivated to use Quitch regularly because their profiles were uncustomisable and therefore made them feel like they were not able to control it unlike in the games they played which allowed for customised appearances.

So our team sought to fix the engagement issue by redesigning Quitch so that profile customisation was built into the foundation of the app. Completing quizzes, competing against fellow students, and logging in every day would reward in-app currency that users could spend to buy clothes for their avatar.

We made our prototype using Adobe XD which made real-time collaboration easy. I created all the assets for the user's avatar using Adobe Photoshop, and ensured that our prototype was consistent in both the layout and colour scheme throughout each screen.

When gathering user feedback, we crafted questionnaires to determine our user demographic, what specific tasks we wanted users to achieve with the app, and how did the users feel when using the prototype. And then we conducted usability testing sessions by recording our interviewees' screens to watch how they interacted with our prototype and timed how long it took to complete each task, and then finally we used that along with their completed questionnaires to iterate on our prototype's design.

I learnt how to compromise with my teammates when we had differing views on how to make the app better, which in turn made me a better team leader as I could listen to them with an open mind.

This project was what sparked my passion for UX design and made me want to pursue it as a career because I thought it was so interesting and fulfilling to design software around a user's experience of it, to learn about their needs and how to satisfy them to make things easier for them. Therefore, I hope that I get to use that passion and curiosity in my future career.