Interacto
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Project Duration: August, 2025 - October, 2025
Project Genesis: During an earlier ethnography assignment in college, I struggled more than I expected and underperformed. The experience stayed with me beyond the grade. Later, while observing freshers navigating their first weeks on campus, I revisited the same methodology with patience to understand how subtle behaviours, hesitation, and social cues shape adjustment.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
© 2023 Aakriti Srivastava
Research-forward. Design-focused. Let's build what matters.
PROBLEM
Freshers entering college without prior social connections experience uneven adjustment due to the lack of structured social scaffolding.
College freshers occupy the same physical environment, yet their emotional and social transitions vary widely. Limited access to peer-driven support leads to hesitant help-seeking, fragile confidence, and uncertainty during early college life. When early adjustment is uneven then engagement, participation, and long-term campus involvement are quietly affected.
SOLUTION
Interacto, a structured interaction system that organizes queries, guidance, and campus conversations into clearly defined, role-based spaces. It enables students to seek help without social friction, receive credible responses from peers, seniors, and mentors, and stay aligned with relevant updates as they move through their transition. By reducing noise and uncertainty, Interacto turns interaction into a guided, confidence-building experience
KEY DESIGN DECISIONS
It began with this research question. The intent wasn’t to define the problem, it was to discover it. That meant stepping back, silencing assumptions that were lingering within as a senior, and letting real fresher life speak for itself to know the unknown.
HOW IT BEGAN
How do freshers of a college interact and adjust with each other?
This persona captures the systemic disadvantage faced by freshers without prior social scaffolding, where delayed access to peer support results in hesitant engagement and uneven adjustment. Over time, these early gaps compound into reduced participation and weaker integration within campus life.
PERSONA
ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
IDEATION
Shaping the solution space to reduce hesitation, ease emotional friction, and create familiarity for connection.
The core focus heavily relied on designing a web app that not only addressed logistical barriers but also crafted interactions that felt safe, inclusive, and emotionally responsive, especially for those feeling socially out of sync.
The design direction shifted from surface-level exploration toward sustained interaction: removing friction not by adding features, but by clarifying focus.
DESIGN ITERATIONS
The process reached a point of fatigue where settling felt easier than questioning decisions. Catching that bias in time led to a complete design reset, and that intentional disruption ultimately strengthened the outcome.
User Feedback highlighted issues around visual hierarchy, context loss, and decision fatigue, which directly informed structural re-prioritisation, layout recalibration, and interaction tightening, resulting in an experience that supports faster orientation and sustained engagement.
ACTIONABLE NEXT STEP & TAKEAWAY
The next step involves extending the design across responsive breakpoints to ensure consistency and usability beyond the desktop experience.
Working on Interacto reinforced how easily visual bias and assumption can creep into design decisions under fatigue, and how stepping back to re-evaluate structure can fundamentally strengthen an experience.
More importantly, the project taught me to design beyond surface-level engagement, focusing instead on emotional safety, intent-driven interaction, and the responsibility of structure when designing for vulnerable transitional phases.