life kit
Helping college students navigate the vast unknown of "adulting."
My Role
Project Lead
Team
1 project lead, 5 designers
Duration
9 Weeks (Winter 2026)
Tools
FigJam, Figma Design
01 — ideation
how it started….
This project was created as part of Project Teams, quarterly designathon hosted by Design @ UCI. The theme, "Designing for the Future," prompted us to generate a variety of ideas. After having to change ideas twice due to conflict of interest with other teams, we ultimately decided on helping college students learn important life skills that are crucial in navigating adulthood.
For many young adults in the U.S.A., college is the first time that they live independently. However, nationwide surveys indicated that 72% of college students feel unprepared to handle cooking, cleaning, general maintenance, and more (ACI, 2022 & Quizlet, 2024). So, how can we guide students and improve student confidence in diving into adulthood?
02 — define
user research
2 surveys distributed to UCI students of all majors and years
79 respondents
5 interviews sourced from survey respondents
User Insights
Students prefer learning through hands-on experience, but often had to buy or go without the tools that enabled firsthand experience.
Students struggled to retain information from the internet, and worried that they would forget crucial information in the heat of the moment.
Students found the topic of adulthood unapproachable, and struggled to balance domestic responsibilities due to burnout issues.
competitive analysis
Our users did not indicate using any apps that were geared towards learning life skills. As a result, we scoured the web to find a total of 4 direct competitors.
All of these mobile apps included written guides and some provisions to make learning more approachable, but none took measures to actually reinforce learning or encourage firsthand experience. Subsequently, there is no existing adulting app targeted towards college students which practices active skill reinforcement or experiential learning.
problem
Many college students feel unprepared to live independently for the first time, relying on the Internet to learn adulting tasks. However, most only learn from firsthand experience, are unsure of where to start, and struggle to retain knowledge — problems the Internet cannot solve.
How might we design a mobile application that provides a hands-on, approachable, and retentive method of learning life skills?
solutions
03 — design
information architecture
We created an information architecture to visualize how each feature and area of the app connected to each other.
user flow
We also created a user flow to understand how users would navigate through the app to complete a task or goal.
usability testing
Usability testing was crucial to the organization and hierarchy of our app. We found that 3/3 testers struggled with the same things: finding reminders, finding check-ins, and finding where to publish their own guides.
As a result, we had to revisit our design process from the beginning. To ensure we were all on the same page, we re-drafted the information architecture and user flow to match actual user behavior, then moved on to re-designing the pages themselves.
After we made all those usability changes, a 4th usability test was conducted. That user had no issues with navigation, and breezed through the original problem areas!
lofis, midfis, and hifis
Community Pages
After conducting usability testing, we found that the community pages needed a massive rework to accommodate check-ins and better signifiers for community guide creation. I stepped in to help a teammate actuate these changes. Specifically, I helped re-design the guides, tools, and services cards for better readability, and ensure that elements were placed along layout guidelines.
Community Dashboard
Building off our changes from usability testing, I also simplified the publishing of community guides, tools, and services. Previously, each of these user-owned elements were controlled on separate pages. However, by condensing these fragmented controls into a centralized dashboard, user's cognitive load and interaction cost was reduced.
Borrowing Flow
I was also primarily in charge of the borrowing flow, where I ensured a clear progression between finding a tool and borrowing it.
05 — outcome
demo video
results
At the end of the 9 weeks, life kit placed 1st out of 9 teams!
key takeaways
Whew…this project taught me a lot, from product design, to navigating tradeoffs, conflict, and feedback as a project lead.
The key lesson I learned was the importance of facilitating discussion and the creation of artifacts to record those discussions. With a critical setback, this project became a test of adaptability, which forced us to rely on asynchronous work and communication. Artifacts like an information architecture and user flow ensured that we stayed synchronized despite the ever-changing requirements.
That's all! Thanks for reading :P
