college sauce
project type
ux/ui, branding
year
winter 2024 – summer 2025
role
co-lead with maxine ancheta
team
2 leads, 4 designers
project overview
College Sauce is a campus events app that helps students discover what's happening nearby, create their own events, and connect through group chats.
I co-led design with Maxine Ancheta across a team of six over a 10-week sprint. I designed the vibe check feature and the onboarding flow, built the event tag system, and directed the mascot system.
quick links
project outcomes
46 surveys, 11 user interviews
conducted across college students
fresh brand identity
logo, mascot, color system, design system
7 features prototyped
40 screens audited
what is college sauce?
College Sauce 1.0 was built by UCSB students to bring campus life into one place.
01
Find events
02
Post your own
03
Connect
the problem
No one asked the students
Sarah Boggs came to Cal Poly Iter8 with three problems: nobody was posting events, group chats died within a day, and her team was uploading content by hand to keep the app looking alive.
Before we designed anything, we audited all 40 screens in the existing app. I set up the format, pain points on one side and how to improve on the other, and split the screens across the team so we all worked the same way.
The original College Sauce UI before our redesign.
map
post event
Setting a location meant dropping a pin instead of typing an address, so the field filled with raw coordinates. The form had no photo and one tag. And no way to repeat an event, which clubs meeting weekly needed most.
group chats
Two chats, no previews, no member counts, nothing telling you whether anything was happening inside. Open one and this is what you got: a text field and a keyboard. No reactions, no way to see who else was in the club. Students joined and left.
our process
How we worked
Five weeks in one FigJam. Maxine and I set it up together, laying out each week's exercises and assignments so all six of us could work in parallel and build upon each other's thinking.
5 weeks in figjam
Audits, affinity maps, moodboards, problem statements, interviews, personas, user flows, Crazy 8's, and screen assignments week by week.
problem statement
research
We surveyed 46 students, interviewed 11 one-on-one, and analyzed 15+ competitor apps to understand how students find out about events, decide whether to go, and connect afterward.
survey findings
Students' top requests weren't about the event itself. They were about whether other people were going. Filters and trending indicators tied at the top, 76% each, and friend-based recommendations came close behind at 73%.
interview findings
Each interview pointed somewhere different. We turned each one into a how-might-we and built from there.
Students told us they wanted to try new events, but often didn't. Without knowing the vibe, the turnout, or who else was going, showing up felt like a risk. So they defaulted to skipping.
scoping the redesign
3 features research led us to build.
The founder came to us with three problems: event discovery, event creation, and dead group chats. Research surfaced three more features worth building.
Attendees rate the vibe live, so anyone still deciding can preview turnout first.
Photos and limited-edition stickers from every event, collected on your profile.
A live layer shows which parts of campus are actually busy.
the deliverables
Text styles, components, and brand guide, packaged and prepped for the client hand-off.
check it out for yourself
the fix
Seven features, one map-first experience
onboarding
I designed the onboarding flow to collect user event interests and clubs upfront so the map is already filtered when a student lands on it. Instead of a feature tour, the first screen they see is their campus, showing what they actually care about.
loading animation by Edrick Wong
explore map
Inspired by Apple Maps, we built a pull-up card system with search, filters, and list view, with color-coded tags to narrow by event type.
sauce map
Toggling the sauce map adds a live density layer, so students can see where the energy is, not just where events are.
event posting
Clubs can now set events to repeat, which cuts down on repetitive tasks. Tags allow for multiple categories and let students filter more precisely, including by wheelchair access, live captions, and service animal friendly. Venue photos, co-hosts, and invite-only or public settings give hosts control over who sees what.
group chats
Being active in a club meant keeping up with Instagram, WhatsApp, and Slack all at once. We pulled it into one place: every club profile opens straight into its chat, where you can see who's in the club, pin the ones you use, and react with stickers.
vibe check
Answered a question students kept asking: how many people are actually going? Attendees rate the vibe in real time so anyone deciding whether to show up can see turnout and energy before they commit.
scrapbook
Photos from an event land in one shared album instead of a group text nobody can find later. Show up and you earn that event's sticker, which lives on your profile.
A saucy brand system
The original brand felt outdated to everyone we interviewed, so we rebuilt it as a team. Maxine and I set the structure: every designer moodboarded independently, then we consolidated and refined from there.
the logotype
Altered letterforms from the Baking Sauce typeface, tomato as an easter egg
the sauces
Somewhere in the process we started naming every color after a sauce as an inside joke. It stuck.
the cast
Pavani drew the original tomato. I unified it into the full family: angry, happy, and sad states, plus functional characters tied to features, from vibe check's flame to onboarding's sauce bottle.
event tags
I extended the palette into 12 categories, each with its own color and icon in active and default states.
app store mockup
A concept for how the brand could look in the App Store. Sarah's planning to update the real screenshots to match.
One call i'd revisit
Our research kept pointing at the same thing: students wanted to know where the energy was without asking. We built the sauce map as something you switch on, but that's exactly the information that should be default, not something you have to remember exists. If I redesigned it today, the density layer would just be the map.
client testimonial
Sarah Boggs
Founder, College Sauce
As someone with no training in design, I came to Iter8 expecting the team would spruce up our initial designs and make our app pretty. Oh how I underestimated the impact Maxine and Sophia would have on my product.
They took complex and sometimes disjointed ideas that I could only express in words and made them into something real.
The friends along the way
We met twice a week in the CIE Hatchery, snacks on the table, a Spotify queue running, laptops overheating after a full day of class. When the ten weeks were up, we all dressed as a tomato for the showcase photo, everyone else in red, Maxine and me in green as the stem. I'm so thankful for this team and the friendships that outlasted the scope.
Team tomato
Thank you to Maxine, my co-lead, for the whole ten weeks and everything after. And to Xouxa Latendresse, Edrick Wong, Subha Eranki, and Pavani Balaji, who showed up twice a week and stayed up late to research, iterate, and polish this redesign alongside their classes. Thank you to Sarah Boggs, who kept Maxine and me on through spring and summer to build out the brand system and the decks that came with it.