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Product

Register

product

Users

UC Riverside undergraduates, primarily on a phone between classes, deciding what to do this week. They open Highlander Hub the way they open Instagram, looking for something to scan rather than something to search. Their context is short, distracted, and visual: walking to class, waiting for food, killing five minutes before lecture.

Secondary users: club officers submitting events through /submit, who care that their listing lands accurately and gets seen.

Product Purpose

Highlander Hub is the one scannable place to find campus and club events at UC Riverside. It pulls from sources clubs already use (Instagram stories, events.ucr.edu, HighlanderLink) so students don't have to follow forty accounts to know what's happening, and so clubs don't have to maintain yet another channel.

Success is mutual:

  • Students treat Highlander Hub as the default weekly check-in for "what's happening on campus."
  • Clubs feel measurable amplification beyond Instagram in attendance and RSVPs.

Built by Highlander Builders Initiative (HBI), for Highlanders.

Brand Personality

Warm, curated, quick.

  • Warm. Feels like a campus thing built by students for students, not a startup tool. Voice is friendly, specific, and grounded in UCR life. Never corporate, never breezy in a B2B way.
  • Curated. Confidence comes from being well-edited, not loud. The site implies a human is looking after it: things are dated, sorted, finite, occasionally opinionated.
  • Quick. The interface respects that students have five seconds before they move on. Every screen earns a glance.

Reference feel: Partiful's warmth, Notion's clarity, the editorial confidence of a publication someone's actually editing.

Anti-references

This should explicitly NOT look like:

  • Generic SaaS landing. Hero-metric templates ("10,000+ events tracked"), identical icon-heading-text card grids, gradient text, stock photos of diverse-people-smiling-at-laptops. The YC-startup-clone aesthetic.
  • University .edu CMS. Institutional navy headers, brochure-like density, link soup, slow load, accessibility-as-checkbox. UCR.edu energy is not Hub energy.
  • Eventbrite / Meetup. Ad-cluttered transactional marketplace, dated chrome, RSVP-button-soup. We are a bulletin, not a marketplace.

Design Principles

  1. Scannable beats searchable. Students give the site five seconds before they decide whether to keep going. The page should pay off a glance, not require a query, filter, or form.
  2. Curated, not infinite. We're a bulletin, not a feed. The design should imply a human is looking after this: finite, edited, dated, occasionally opinionated. Empty states are honest, not padded.
  3. Warm, not corporate. Copy, color, and voice should feel like a campus thing. If a sentence could appear on a B2B SaaS landing, rewrite it. If a visual could appear on any university homepage, rework it.
  4. Discovery is the front door; submission is a side door. Students lead every tradeoff. The submit flow is clean and confident, but it never crowds the discovery surface. Browsing wins over contributing.
  5. Could only exist for UCR. Built by HBI, for Highlanders. Specifics, the campus, the clubs, the language, the rhythm of the quarter, should be felt in the design, not erased into a generic events template.

Accessibility & Inclusion

  • WCAG AA for contrast, semantic structure, and focus behavior.
  • Mobile-first. Touch targets, layout, and load are designed for a phone on campus Wi-Fi, not a desktop in a dorm.

Additional commitments (reduced-motion handling, colorblind-safe category signaling, screen-reader strategy for flyer images) are open questions to revisit when the relevant features are designed.