Before commencing the school year, freshman of Indiana Wesleyan University are introduced to campus life and culture through New Student Orientation (NSO) week.  NSO gives students the opportunity to acclimate themselves to their new lifestyle without the stress or pressure of college courses.  As such, the week is packed to the brim with exciting social activities and events to attend.

Arriving as a freshman at IWU in 2020, I can distinctly remember the waves of confusion that overwhelmed me.  Although I was excited to begin my college career, there were a myriad of details and information that I was expected to remember in such a short amount of time.  Whether it was campus slang, building acronyms, or locations, I had a tough time processing all of the information.

The heart of the issue lied within the fact that these details were not easy to come by.  

The resident assistant that was in charge of my floor instructed me to install three different apps on my phone to acquire necessary information to navigate NSO week; there was an app to access the campus map, student events, and daily meetings - none of which were optimized for mobile phones.

Not only were crucial pieces of communication poorly centralized, but the information that we as students were expected to access was incredibly difficult and unintuitive to find.  To this day, I can still remember telling myself that there has to be a better way.

For the next three years, I continued to wonder how I, as a graphic designer, could make that initial IWU experience easier for our students.

For my senior capstone project, I sought to design a multi-purpose app that could introduce freshmen to campus life more effectively.

It was my goal to reduce the amount of initial confusion that freshmen experience while simultaneously creating an intuitive and comprehensible mobile experience that accurately reflects the visual style of Indiana Wesleyan University’s brand.