TStar: UofT Cohort App

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Context and problem space

University of Toronto students balance demanding academics with work and personal commitments, making it difficult to build meaningful connections. Existing campus platforms are broad and not designed to foster connection within academic cohorts, where shared classes and goals create the strongest sense of belonging.

How might we design a low-friction way for students within the same cohort to form meaningful peer connections?

My role

As Team Lead, UX Designer and Researcher, I:

• Led group discussions and delegated tasks
• Managed the timely completion of each stage
• Wrote the interview protocol and conducted one-on-one user interviews
• Sketched the initial low-fidelity prototype of our user flow
• Collected feedback from target users through a think-aloud study
• Prototyped high-fidelity Figma screens of our app

Process

We followed the Double Diamond design process: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.

Phase 01: Discover

Research method

To understand our problem space, we conducted surveys (31 responses) and interviews (11 students) with University of Toronto students from various faculties. I led a group affinity diagramming activity that organized the data into nine themes.

Key insights from research

Check these percentages against your raw data. With 31 responses, 54.9% isn't possible (17/31 is 54.8%). Consider using counts like "17 of 31".

Students barely hang out with cohort peers outside of class

Only 30% of survey respondents talk or hang out with their classmates outside of class, with the other 70% doing so a few times a month, occasionally, or never.

→ There’s a lack of third spaces for students to make connections.

Interaction with cohort peers is primarily for academic purposes

64% of interviewees said they speak with other students in their cohort mainly for academic purposes and have a separate friend group for socializing.

→ There are limited opportunities for students to socialize with peers casually.

Students struggle to make friends with their cohort peers

Large faculty size, varying commuting situations and a lack of time and energy were the main reasons. Moreover, 54.9% of survey respondents described themselves as very to somewhat reserved.

→ Students have difficulty initiating conversation when they don’t feel clearly invited to socialize.

Faculty-established events are ineffective for making friends

100% of interviewees did not find faculty-established events an effective way to make friends, describing them as too professional and intimidating for genuine connection.

→ Low-pressure environments are a more comfortable space to make friends.

Phase 02: Define

Problem space scoping

Based on our research, we created a persona, empathy map and as-is scenario to narrow the scope of our problem space. For the as-is scenario, my group voted on the stages that revealed the most significant pain points, using empathy to guide our decisions. This helped us prioritize the challenges that mattered most to our target user.

Need statements

• Shy Sherry needs a way to start conversations so that she can make cohort friends without worrying about awkward social situations.
• Shy Sherry needs a way to engage in social situations within her cohort so that she stops scrolling her phone and waiting for others to initiate conversation.
• Shy Sherry needs a way to make cohort friends without attending faculty events so that she can return home early.
• Shy Sherry needs a way to participate in social activities that don’t interfere with her commuting schedule so that she can make friends in a comfortable and casual atmosphere.

Phase 03: Develop

Ideation, dot voting and prioritization

Each team member brainstormed ideas that addressed the need statements. After generating a wide range of ideas, we dot voted and sorted them on a prioritization grid, which let us focus on the most popular “home run” ideas for our final solution.

Low-fidelity prototype

• Gamifying real-life peer interaction: uses gamification to lower the barrier to starting real-life interactions and foster meaningful, memorable connections.
• Browsing customizable profiles: highlights interests and completed Cohort Quests, making it easy for students to find common ground and start conversations.
• Poking fun at cohort peers: a “Shoot a Star” button reduces the pressure of breaking the ice in real life.
• Building towards a collective goal: turns individual interactions into a shared, milestone-driven goal that fosters collective engagement.

Add a sentence or a test quote showing why gamification felt low-pressure to reserved students like Shy Sherry.

Think-aloud study takeaways

We ran a think-aloud study with 5 target users on the lo-fi screens and identified pain points to improve:

1. Unclear labels and inconsistent icons
2. Lack of options for QR code scanning
3. Unintuitive user flow after “Shoot a Star”

Phase 04: Deliver

High-fidelity prototype

Building on the think-aloud findings, here is the hi-fi prototype of our cohort-based community app.

Show a before and after for each of the 3 think-aloud findings. Link the interactive Figma prototype.

User flow 1: completing Quest Hotdog

User flow 2: shooting a star at AJ

Reflection and lessons learned

Define a clear research focus early. Broad exploration is valuable, but aligning research scope closely with the target user and solution leads to more actionable insights. Narrowing our focus earlier would have produced findings more directly relevant to a cohort-specific intervention.

Prioritize divergent ideation before converging. Time constraints limited us to one low-fidelity prototype per task, restricting exploration. Encouraging parallel sketching across the team would have strengthened concept development and led to a more refined solution.

Design is iterative. With only one iteration cycle, key usability feedback surfaced late. More rounds of testing would have let us further refine the information architecture and content prioritization. This reinforced that strong design emerges through continuous testing and iteration.