MyTyde is a social calendar application created by a small remote start-up. It started as an application where users search and add events that organizers post to the public.
I joined the 3-person design team as a Product Designer in July 2020, and since then I have been able to:
1. Help MyTyde adapt their application approach to COVID-19
2. Completely redesign the main aesthetics of the mobile application
3. Revamp the design system
4. Design/develop a number of new features
Context
MyTyde started as an event platform for college students. Individual parties would create and post events to the platform. Students could follow these event providers and RSVP to events, saving them to a page where they could view all "Attending" events. After releasing the product, they had mediocre success and a low retention rate.
Due to COVID-19, MyTyde had an opportunity to change its focus. After interviewing individuals who were and were not familiar with the app, a new problem was realized. MyTyde pivoted its focus on helping organizers better interact and engage with members in their groups through events and announcements.
What's the Problem?
How might we help student organizations effectively engage with their members in a single platform?
Student organizations have multiple needs that are tackled with several different platforms. This caused communication to be disorganized and the onboarding process to be difficult. The nature of student organizations having a high churn rate made this even more difficult and frequent. New members would need to be added to several platforms, and old members would need to be removed.
The two biggest pain points that were discovered were interactions revolving around events and group communication.
Events
Administrators wanted the ability to create, schedule, and share events with members. It was also important for administrators to be able to see individual and group engagement with these events.
Group members needed to be able to easily RSVP to events and view them in a schedule.
Communication
Administrators needed a way to make organization-wide announcements, and have the importance of these announcements communicated clearly.
Both members and administrators also needed a method to communicate directly within the application.
What's the Solution?
MyTyde's redesigned solution is an application that allows group administrators and group members to easily conduct and participate in group activities on a single platform. The application will allow group members to actively participate and interact with organizations. The solution allows group operations to run more smoothly by providing a single platform where several needs can be met.
The solution also tackles the main business problem of poor user retention that MyTyde faced with the old application. With the entire organization conducting group activities within the platform, all members will need to download the application to be active members.
Event Calendar
The Event Calendar is one of the main pillars of the application. This feature allows users to view and interact with the events that organizers create. Originally, members could only view events, but not interact with them.
Because of MyTyde's change in direction, we re-evaluated the old design and adjusted it to better fit the new goals of the application.
We realized that there was a need to rethink the calendar. Since we were shifting our focus to student organization involvement, it was necessary to have a place where group members could directly interact and engage with events in the redesign. We added another tab so the user can view upcoming events in addition to the standard calendar view.
Announcements
The Announcement page is another main feature. Users are able to view and react to announcements that administrators post. Administrators can create new announcements, pin announcements, share events, and create polls.
Sidebar Navigation
The application had a sidebar system that we divided into two. One focused on actions that users can take within groups, and the other focused on actions that the user can take outside of their groups.
Event Labels
In a new feature that I developed with the product lead, users could categorize their events with labels which are reflected on the calendar views.
