Students, especially freshmen, may have difficulty navigating their new college campuses. High school students visiting campus for the first time are also likely to get lost without a guide. W;nk is an app that helps prospective students and visitors explore campus buildings and culture with ease.

I served as the UI/UX designer for the W;nk app and worked to streamline the onboarding and tutorial features of the app. The basic idea behind W;nk is that users can find a building and take a picture of it to identify where they are on campus and to learn more about the building's history and resources.

First-time users see a tutorial that explains how to use the app.

The one-page tutorial directs users to find a building on campus, point their camera in the building's direction, and take a photo to learn more about the building

When a photo is taken, W;nk identifies the campus building.

Using the phone's compass and geolocation data at the time the photo is taken, W;nk's algorithm determines which campus building the user is interested in by accounting for field of view, distance, and bearing.

After finding the location, W;nk displays the campus building's information.

W;nk queries the Firebase Realtime Database that's populated with information about campus buildings web-scrapped from the maps.northwestern.edu website. This includes the name, brief description, and image of the building.

Video Demo:

W;nk strives to help people explore and navigate Northwestern's campus by giving users information about important campus buildings with a click of a button. This project involved thinking about the system in terms of gathering building data, defining an algorithm to distinguish between buildings, and displaying the information in a user friendly format. To learn more about the project, please visit the NU W;nk GitHub repo!