Background

The UC Davis ARC (Activities and Recreation Center) plays a vital role in enhancing the campus community's health, wellness, and engagement by providing access to fitness facilities, classes, programs, and recreational activities.

Prompt

Your goal is to envision a modern and user-centric redesign of the UC Davis Recreation app.

The redesigned app should seamlessly connect users to a wide range of fitness and wellness resources while fostering a sense of community engagement. Please complete the following:

1. Identify the user base

   Who is the target user of this app? What are their needs, motivations, and background?

   
   

2. Redesign the user interface (UI)

   Create a user-friendly interface by redesigning the app’s UI to be intuitive, visually appealing, and easy to navigate.

   
   

3. Enhance features

   Ideate and design 1-3 new features or improvements to the existing services offered through the app to meet and exceed user needs.

Treat this assignment as if you're a designer working with product managers and developers. You have control over the core functionality of the product and are pitching it to a product manager.

Criteria

The goal of this challenge is to provide us with a better understanding of your abilities to identify and design solutions for pain points that users face. Here’s a breakdown of what we’re assessing for the take-home:

1. Design thinking: Do you understand the end user, their specific use cases, and how the product will address their needs? Are the proposed features addressing the core problem(s) present? Are design decisions validated through research and user testing?

   
   

2. User experience: Is the design focused, simple, and intuitive? Are new features integrated seamlessly and intuitive to use? Are user interactions and functionality prioritized over pure aesthetics?

   
   

3. User interface: Does the UI look appealing and follow best practices? Is the design system in adherence to existing UC Davis colors and typography?

   
   

4. Execution: Are the mockups/prototypes thorough, easy to understand, and ready to be passed on to a developer (auto-layouted and consistent)?

   
   

5. Accessibility: Is the app accessible to users of all abilities? Have you considered color contrast and other web/mobile accessibility elements?

   
   

Deliverables

1. Slide deck

   Create a slide deck (max 12 slides) walking through your project. Include visuals as well as written aids — we want to learn about your design process and understand why you made the decisions you did in your designs. Please submit your slide deck in PDF format (a Google Drive link).

   If you are not sure how to begin, feel free to refer to these example slides.

   
   

2. High-fidelity mockup and/or prototype
   You’re welcome to submit exported images of individual screens or directly provide the link to a Figma prototype/file.

   The take-home is used to assess your skill level in your respective role, as well as give us insight into your thought process when working on technical projects.