Club Hub is a personalized central platform to help students discover and connect with the right college clubs that align with their interests and passions. It was a mobile app initially created for the 2024 Rice Designathon and later refined as a personal project.

College clubs are difficult to discover and connect with.

Undergraduates often face challenges when trying to find campus clubs that align with their personal interests, schedules, and goals. While extracurricular activities play a significant role in fostering community and skill development, the process of discovering and joining clubs is often inefficient, overwhelming, and impersonal.

Create a seamless and personalized club discovery experience.

Currently, students must sift through lengthy lists, attend time-consuming fairs, or rely on word-of-mouth to find clubs, which frequently leads to missed opportunities and disengagement. For new students or those with busy schedules, the lack of personalization and scheduling alignment only adds to the frustration.

Therefore, our solution focuses on:
1. Providing personalized recommendations to match individual interests and goals.
2. Minimizing the effort required to find and join clubs.
3. Reducing scheduling conflicts by aligning club events with students’ availability.

What are the main pain points?

Our team explored the undergraduate club finding experience through a survey form approach, collecting ~35 responses. Our results revealed that:
> 83% had a hard time finding clubs in general
> 60% felt the need for a centralized database for club finding
> 55% only used word-of-mouth as the main source of finding clubs"

In order to help guide our design process and narrow down the user base, we created a target persona Ben, who would be using the app to find and discover clubs.

We mapped out a user journey that illustrates how a student navigates the app to discover and connect with campus clubs.

Our big ideas and a touch of personality

Before designing, we mapped out different features we could provide with our app and solidified on our big solutions.

We created some information architecture to guide the structure of the app and how its proposed features would interact with each other.

We wanted the app to feel academic yet playful. Thus, inspired the idea of connectivity, I designed the logo and design system to reflect that.

How did we arrive at the final design?

After our initial submission, we revisited the design to address visual and UX issues based on user feedback. Key areas for improvement focused on essential features: club profile pages, the search filter, and the profile/calendar. Let’s dive into how we tackled these challenges.