UXST: Auxilio’s strategic UX journey

Applying the UX Strategy Toolkit to design a community-driven platform for college students

Fall 2024

My Role

As the project manager, I led the application of the UX Strategy Toolkit for Auxilio, guiding the team through each phase of the process, from defining user personas to crafting the product’s value proposition.

Project Overview

Auxilio is a student-driven platform designed to help college students exchange skills, services, and goods to alleviate stress and foster community. Using the UX Strategy Toolkit from Jaime Levy’s book, we developed a user-centered solution, refining the app through prototyping on Figma and remote user testing.

The Problem

At the start of the semester, we felt strongly that we had a great idea: a mobile app that empowers college students to exchange skills, services, and goods, all while building community. However, we weren’t sure if there was room in the market for such a product. We needed to validate whether students would see real value in this type of exchange and if it would be something they would actively use to alleviate common stressors — financial, academic, and social — during their college experience.

The Solution

Lean Canvas

We launched our UX strategy by starting with a Lean Canvas, laying out the problem, our proposed solution, our advantages, key metrics, our customer base and, perhaps most importantly, our unique value proposition. We spent a significant amount of time thinking through this piece of the puzzle and ultimately landed on a UVP that we felt confident about: We’re helping alleviate financial and academic stressors by offering a self-sustaining, community-driven ecosystem on college campuses where students can easily trade skills, knowledge, services, and material goods. Encouraging students to connect with each other to find solutions to everyday needs will help them build a vibrant social community.

Defining Initial Value Proposition

The next step was defining the Initial Value Proposition of our Capstone Project. First, we spelled out our primary customer segment as financially conscious, community-minded college students seeking affordable and reliable services for academic support, personal development, and everyday tasks near campus. We also refined the problem we set out to solve: College students face a broad range of stressors, from financial and social concerns to the long-term impacts of ongoing environmental crises.

These components pointed us to clarify and tighten up our UVP: AUXILIO is an app where students can trade skills and services, such as tutoring, translations, and personal training, to encourage a sense of service and community on campuses and motivate users to seek sustainable, wallet-friendly solutions to everyday needs.

Of course, we had to test the UVP, and to do that we had to craft a provisional user persona that fit our customer segment. We decided to focus our persona on students who need services:

Snapshot of Auxilio’s UXST toolkit section on provisional personas.

We conducted interviews with seven current and recently graduated university students to validate our assumptions about the challenges students face, as well as the pain points highlighted in our provisional persona. Not only did we confirm these points, but we also uncovered new insights. We found that more students than expected struggle with finding community on campus, and that traditional community-building avenues, like Greek life, are often expensive, adding to students’ financial stress. Students are also concerned about what happens to their belongings after graduation or during transitions between moves. One participant even mentioned he would immediately sign up for Auxilio if it meant finding students to help walk his dog during his long class days. We also discovered a need for peer-to-peer support in areas like tutoring, especially for students with learning disabilities, as the high cost of professional tutoring can be prohibitive.

Overall, students expressed a strong desire for a platform that allows them to support one another in practical ways, reducing both financial and social burdens.

Competitive Analysis Matrix

Our team conducted a thorough competitive analysis of services that offer peer-to-peer marketplaces, skills services, community building for college students and/or assistance with everyday tasks. Working through a competitive analysis matrix, we reviewed each competitor’s value proposition, funding, digital traffic, subscribers, key features, customer reviews, and other details to perform a thorough SWOT analysis:

The direct competitors — Rumie, NearPeer, WeBe — focus on safely serving college students by building community through creating niche marketplaces for buying and selling items.

The indirect competitors are vast: From established, major social networks including Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor and FreeCycle, to more niche peer-to-peer skills or bartering platforms, such as Tandem, HaveNeed and Solid.

While the larger social networks offer large marketplaces where users can buy and sell virtually anything (Facebook Marketplace), the more niche platforms focus on connecting users of similar interests or needs to swap for items (Have Need) or help each other with skills (Tandem) and services (Solid).

We found that the marketplace for apps that could help is competitive but offers room for differentiation. Apps like Rumie and Depop have capitalized on providing users an alternative to the larger, yet less secure second-hand marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace and Nextdoor. Others such as HaveNeed and Solid highlight the importance of user-friendly interfaces, task matching, and community, but they don’t offer security or a sense of community. Meanwhile, niche platforms NearPeer address specific aspects of student life, such as early peer connections, but do not emphasize the barter system or sustainability.

Storyboarding Value Innovation

Working through the competitive analysis matrix helped us refine key features unique to Auxilio, including Exclusive Sign-On for On-Campus College Students, User Profiles, User-Generated Posts, In-app Messaging, and a Token-Based System. Once we had a handle on those key features, we knew we needed to test them and laid out a storyboard to think through the flow of a prototype:

Rapid Prototype

Given the importance of these features, we needed to quickly validate whether they would resonate with our target users and function as intended. Rather than spending extensive time on a high-fidelity prototype, we opted for a simple, rapid prototype on Figma that focused on the core functionality. We incorporated a retro music theme inspired by auxiliary cords, which helped students feel more engaged and “plugged” into the community, mirroring the app’s purpose of connecting people:

We used Figma to create a rapid prototype of Auxilio.

We also wanted to ensure that the ecosystem we created would be fair and equitable, so we introduced a token-based system called “jacks” to be exchanged for services within the platform.

This approach allowed us to get early feedback on key elements like user sign-up, posting services, messaging, and interactions within the app. By testing a basic version of these features, we could identify pain points and usability issues before committing to more time-consuming design iterations. This process also helped us prioritize which features to refine or reconsider based on user feedback, ensuring we were building a product that truly met the needs of students.

Our testing focused on five hypotheses:

1. Students will find value in using Auxilio to trade skills and services, and this will foster a sense of community while reducing their need for paid services.
2. Students will find enough value in Auxilio’s skill and service exchange platform to pay a subscription fee.
3. Limiting access to Auxilio through exclusive sign-on for on-campus college students will create a trusted, tight-knit community that students find more reliable and safe for exchanging skills and services.
4. Allowing users to create posts about the skills or services they need and offer will drive engagement and foster a dynamic, self-sustaining marketplace where students frequently interact and exchange services.
5. Students will consistently engage with Auxilio’s token system, where earning and spending tokens for services creates a sustainable, self-sufficient marketplace without the need for monetary transactions.

Every hypothesis was validated — with a few caveats

While most of our hypotheses were validated, we uncovered some important nuances. Initially, we thought that ‘syncs’ or community event posts would be viewed as a secondary feature, but users expressed a strong interest in them, indicating they were a key element of engagement.

We also believed a traditional ratings system would be essential for maintaining accountability, yet some users raised concerns about the potential for negative perceptions, prompting us to reconsider its design.

Lastly, while we assumed that users would prioritize a system like ‘jacks’ to maintain a balance between giving and taking, the feedback showed that while the concept was well-received, it wasn’t a primary concern for most users.

Pivots in the Works

Since our initial user testing, we have made several pivots and continue to evolve our thinking around Auxilio as we structure our UX research plan for next year. Among the changes we’re making so far :

• Shift from reviews to a merit-based badge system.
• Re-evaluate the token system and whether it aligns with Auxilio’s overall goals.
• Put less emphasis on categories at registration step, move toward descriptive bios and internal tags.
• Review use of “aux” terminology to ensure we’re not sacrificing clarity for the theme.

Results

Using the UX Strategy Toolkit as a guide, our rapid prototyping and testing of Auxilio’s key features provided valuable insights that will inform future iterations of the app.

We validated that students find significant value in trading skills and services, which fosters a sense of community while alleviating financial and academic stress. The exclusive sign-on system for on-campus students was effective in creating a trusted environment, while user-generated posts and in-app messaging helped drive engagement. The token-based “jacks” system was well-received, but not a primary concern, prompting us to reassess its prominence in the ecosystem.

Moving forward, we plan to refine the merit-based badge system, adjust the token model, and simplify user registration, ensuring that the app aligns more closely with student needs. The feedback has reinforced the importance of balancing practicality with community engagement, with the UX Strategy Toolkit providing a clear framework to continue refining the product.