Kappa Theta Pi Life App
Kappa Theta Pi (KTP) is a co-ed professional technology fraternity formed at UMich back in 2012 with the slogan "for the love of technology". Since it's initially founding in the Informatics school, KTP has been fllled with hundreds of alumni in diverse majors like Computer Science, UX Design, Information Analysis, Mechanical Engineering, Data Science, and more! Upon joining KTP in my first semester Fall 2022, I had the chance to become friends with 70+ members through hour-long one-on-one coffee chats. These were the same friends I ended up working on the Kappa Theta Life App with! After the initial designs and code were laid out in 2021 by two people whom I look up to very much, "the App" gets updated by project teams every single summer. I've had the privilege of working on four different project teams over a few summers resulting in experience with communication skills and design work on many of the Alumni Features.
An App Overview
The KTP Life App has a few main functions: housing all information of members, potential new members, and alumni; highlighting brothers and alumni through stories, brother/alumni spotlights, the knowledge base, and lineage tree; and hosting logistical items like the calendar, the point counter, and other settings. When we work on updating the app every summer, we focus on fixing bugs, updating current features, and creating new features. I've been fortunate enough to be on the creative end of many projects like ideating on new alumni interaction features!
Throughout the semester, KTP hosts committee meetings including a Design Committee. This committee meets weekly to work on design challenges, Figma workshops, and - especially near the end of the school year - Life App designs. Once we reach summer, our teams often have an idea of where they are starting, but still work through ideating, brainstorming, and sketching phases. When working on the alumni features, my team also reached out to past alumni for the feedback and ideas of what they might want to see on the app.
Each person on the app has their own personalizable profile! These include fields like Year, Major, College, Pledge Class, About Me, Badges, Interest chips, and Contact Information. However, our team noticed that when we transitioned these member profiles to be alumni profiles, they had no alumni-specific fields. We went through some ideas of having tab structure, toggles between a member profile and alumni, or just redoing the entire profile to fit alumni. After considering our options, we ended up keeping the same general structure to maintain consistency, but also make it unique for alumni.
This is the part of the project our team got to be more creative and take into account more user feedback. We reached out to many recent alumni with questions like: "What alumni features would get you to be mroe involved on the KTP Life App?" and "How do you want to stay connected to current members of KTP?" After gathering our answes, we worked through some brainstorming and deciding upon what was feasible for developers and what wasn't. Finally, we worked to design the Alumni Map, incorporating many features from other map-based applications and trying to put our own twist on them.
Our Executive Board (E-Board) requested an update to their currently outdated "E-Board Portal". The goal of the portal was to allow specific users with given permissions to change and modify certain aspects of the app from within itself. The current portal worked, however its design made it unusable. Our design team sought out pain points and identified what specific aspects caused the portal to lack usability. We then made a few mid-fidelity options to present to the E-Board, and allowed them to give feedback and choose what went into development.
This has truly been one of the projects I am most proud of as a college student. With 200+ new users downloading the app each semester, almost 100 members using it weekly, and 50+ alumni with accounts, I can see my team and I's hard work pay off. With my graduation approaching soon at the time I write this, I look forward to seeing the features I worked on (alumni profiles and alumni map) go into development and be added for me to use as an alumni myself! This app will continue to grow in the future with many new iterations and features coming out every year. I plan to be available to answer questions and give feedback whenever members ask!
