Everyday, thousands of students across the world are writing papers, working on projects, and working on school assignments.
eggcite is a website and mobile app designed to aid high school and college students with citing and organizing their sources.
UX researcher
UX designer
Visual design
August 2021 | three weeks
Currently, there are many online citation services available, however, online citation websites are overridden with too much unhelpful information, too many ads, and confusing formatting for students to navigate through, which are costing students too much time.
eggcite. eggcite is an online website and mobile app aiding high school and college students worldwide cite and organize their sources accurately and with ease.
Before jumping into designing any solutions, I had to figure out exactly what frustrations users had when using online citations websites.
I created a survey using Google forms and asked a series of questions to get a general overview of who my users were and how they felt about the citation process as a whole.
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users could not find Stephanie's home design portfolio
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users did not like the inconsistent font style, size, and formatting
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned an overwhelming amount of information
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned the navigation bar was confusing
The most common key pain points I identified through conducting user research further assured my predicted assumptions of challenges users were facing while navigating through the website.
👉 Overwhelming amount of information
👉 Inconsistent design across website
causes confusion
👉 Information scattered across the website
👉 Portfolio is hard to access
👉 Users want access to the most important
information (i.e. services, portfolio, contact
information, about, testimonials)
👉 Users want to view credentials in order to
establish SBS as credible
In order to get a better understanding of the root problems students were facing when citing their sources online, I conducted five user interviews.
User interviews allowed me to get into in-depth conversations with real students and understand their frustrations better. Here, I discovered that the main frustrations students were facing were dealing with saving time, saving their progress, viewing previous work, and organizing their citations.
"As a busy undergraduate student, I want to save recent work and access it easily, so that I can jump from task to task without worrying about losing my progress."
Adrian is a busy undergraduate student who needs a way to save and organize citations because he needs to access them easily when he leaves to complete other tasks.
Creating and constructing a user journey map revealed how helpful including additional features, such as an option to save and organize citations, would be to a student like Adrian
It also revealed improvement opportunities for accessibility for students who have limited mobility
"As a heavily involved high school senior, I want to save time completing writing assignments, so that I can spend more time playing volleyball, tutoring kids, and being involved in school.
I looked into products in the market that offer similar services to students to see what they were doing well, what they weren't doing well, and to compare the different user experiences students had within these existing products.
I found that:
✨Easybib, CitationMachine, and bibme, were bombarded with ads and focused less on creating an easy citing experience for students.
✨None of the online citation sources offered a way for students to save their citations or organize them by assignment or category.
✨Easybib, CitationMachine, and bibme, offered various citations styles, while Scribbr only offered APA and MLA citation styles.
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users could not find Stephanie's home design portfolio
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users did not like the inconsistent font style, size, and formatting
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned an overwhelming amount of information
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned the navigation bar was confusing
The most common key pain points I identified through conducting user research further assured my predicted assumptions of challenges users were facing while navigating through the website.
👉 Overwhelming amount of information
👉 Inconsistent design across website
causes confusion
👉 Information scattered across the website
👉 Portfolio is hard to access
👉 Users want access to the most important
information (i.e. services, portfolio, contact
information, about, testimonials)
👉 Users want to view credentials in order to
establish SBS as credible
Grabbing paper and pens, I was able to start ideating possible solutions. I used various ideating methods to begin brainstorming solutions, such as HMW's and Crazy Eights.
I approached user's needs by creating an intuitive process that was easy to follow. Citing sources consists of a series of steps. I wanted to ensure that navigating through that process was as simple and usable as possible
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users could not find Stephanie's home design portfolio
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users did not like the inconsistent font style, size, and formatting
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned an overwhelming amount of information
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned the navigation bar was confusing
The most common key pain points I identified through conducting user research further assured my predicted assumptions of challenges users were facing while navigating through the website.
👉 Overwhelming amount of information
👉 Inconsistent design across website
causes confusion
👉 Information scattered across the website
👉 Portfolio is hard to access
👉 Users want access to the most important
information (i.e. services, portfolio, contact
information, about, testimonials)
👉 Users want to view credentials in order to
establish SBS as credible
One of the key frustrations users had was being able to save a citation and refer back to it later
Adding a recents section allows students to access their citations for further editing and completion
An easy way to organize citations was another pain point students, like Adrian, were facing.
With a section for organizing citations, students can now add their completed citations to their corresponding assignment folder
Students may also add new assignments as needed
Revised wireframes after low-fidelity prototype testing:
After a series of usability testing using my low-fidelity prototype, it was revealed that some users were confused about the meaning of different icons in the navigation bar.
I decided this favorites feature was similar to the recents feature and opted to leave the favorites feature out.
"citations" was changed to "assignments" in order to clearly showcase to students the exact purpose of this feature
Students can choose to save and finish citations for future editing
Once a citation is completed, students can easily add it to the corresponding assignment and add a new assignment as needed, directly from the same screen
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users could not find Stephanie's home design portfolio
👤👤👤👤 | four out of five users did not like the inconsistent font style, size, and formatting
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned an overwhelming amount of information
👤👤👤👤👤 | five out of five users mentioned the navigation bar was confusing
The most common key pain points I identified through conducting user research further assured my predicted assumptions of challenges users were facing while navigating through the website.
👉 Overwhelming amount of information
👉 Inconsistent design across website
causes confusion
👉 Information scattered across the website
👉 Portfolio is hard to access
👉 Users want access to the most important
information (i.e. services, portfolio, contact
information, about, testimonials)
👉 Users want to view credentials in order to
establish SBS as credible
After various iterations, usability testing, and focusing on the underlying UX, I created a high-fidelity prototype which reveals all the eggciting features available for students which include; viewing recent citations, saving citations for future editing, and organizing citations by assignment type.
Measuring success with an application like eggcite meant testing with students and interviewing them afterwards. When asking students their overall thoughts and feelings about using eggcite, this is what they had to say:
eggcite was a very interesting case study. Citing sources is a task I as a student am familiar with and have had my own share of frustrations with. It was exciting to work on a project that would be useful to a student like me, as well as students around the world.
Because eggcite was a brand new application concept, focusing on user research was vital to the entire process. User research and continuous usability testing revealed how the design process should move going forward, and brought about new insights throughout the process.
Some next steps I would consider are how to make the mobile app more accessible by including less touch points and making it a voice-controlled app. I am also working on a desk-top version of the application as well. My next steps also include how to create a familiar cross-functional mobile app experience onto the website for students
Thank you for checking out my case-study and please feel free to let me know what you thought about it :)