Interacto
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Project Overview: The project addresses gaps in clarity, guidance, and psychological safety that emerge during early college life, where students often struggle to identify reliable sources of information and support. Through a structured desktop experience, Interacto enables purposeful peer and mentor interactions while clearly organising conversations, updates, and community signals.
Project Duration: August, 2025 - October, 2025
RESEARCH QUESTION
How do freshers of a college interact and adjust with each other?
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 through ethnographic research to know the unknown.
Students entered college with a blend of excitement and hesitation, forming early bonds while adjusting to a new environment.
PERIPHERAL OBSERVATION
ACTIVE OBSERVATION
FOCUS GROUPS
A gap between expectations and reality left students navigating shallow social ties, unclear support, and a lack of psychological safety.
As per the interaction with 3 focus groups we discovered that students entered college expecting collaborative classrooms and effortless social integration, but their experiences often reflected limited interaction, fragile peer bonds, and uneven access to social circles shaped by housing and prior networks.
Many struggled to identify where to seek guidance, especially when navigating emotional or peer-related challenges, and hesitation around judgment discouraged open help-seeking. Together, these patterns revealed that the difficulty was not a lack of people, but a lack of structure, clarity, and psychological safety within shared campus spaces.
Freshers without prior connections face uneven adjustment due to absence of structured scaffolding.
IDENTIFIED PROBLEM
College freshers share the same physical environment yet experience fragmented adjustment. Limited access to peer-driven support creates uneven emotional transitions, low help-seeking, and uncertainty in navigating early college life. This reveals a need for scalable, trust-centred systems that foster belonging, psychological safety, and guided social integration.
USER PERSONAS
Shaping the solution space to reduce hesitation, ease emotional friction, and create familiarity for connection.
BRAINSTORMING
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.
SITEMAP
A structured interaction system that enables students to seek guidance, stay informed, and engage with peers and mentors in a psychologically safe environment.
MOCKUPS
Bento grid has been used to organise key features with clarity making the dashboard easier to scan and navigate. The modular blocks allow users to quickly identify what matters, updates, chatrooms, events, and guidance without visual clutter. Its balanced spacing, soft hierarchy, and structured grouping create an intuitive, calm interface that supports quick orientation for freshers who are still adapting to campus life.
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.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
© 2023 Aakriti Srivastava
Research-forward. Design-focused. Let's build what matters.