UMICH · SI 511 AI-UX · 2026
Michigan
Football VIP
An offline-first game-day app for the Big House's premium suites.
When 110,000 phones hit one cell tower, the VIP experience can't depend on a signal.
An offline-first game-day app for the Big House's premium suites.
When 110,000 phones hit one cell tower, the VIP experience can't depend on a signal.
VIP suite holders pay a premium for a frictionless game day — then hit the exact same walls as the $30 ticket: dead cell signal at a packed gate, battery anxiety across a four-hour game, no idea where their suite or the nearest nursing room is.
The "premium" evaporates at the moment of highest stress — the last ten minutes from car to seat, in front of the clients they came to impress.
The bet: reliability is the luxury. For this user, an app that works at zero bars beats any flashy perk.
Brings clients; dreads a glitch at the gate more than missing the game. Wants redundancy and "it just works."
Time is money; hates the general-admission herd line. Wants to be told exactly which lane, which gate, now.
Juggling kids and guests. Wants the nearest nursing room and the shortest walk — fast.
Instead of a tab-hunt, a Contextual Timeline surfaces the one thing you need at each step — navigate → enter → in-suite. Three craft decisions carried the offline-first promise.
Tap to enter, no signal needed, with a loud "Offline Mode Active" badge to kill the anxiety.
Big House wayfinding cached on-device — survives a dead connection.
Nursing Room / Restroom / Food — two taps to a facility.
AI accelerated every step of this project — generating the PRD, the screens, the usability analysis. The value wasn't the speed. It was knowing when the fluent answer was the wrong one. Three calls:
Built an offline NFC ticket for the gate — then designed a live, network-dependent map for inside the stadium.
No signal at the gate means no signal at the seat. I made the entire wayfinding layer offline — trading live GPS for 100% reliability.
Analyzing the usability test, it reported the user "successfully navigated to childcare needs."
The transcript said the opposite: the tester gave up, frustrated, and tapped Call Attendant. I trusted the recording over the AI's summary and added Quick Filters to fix the real failure.
A tester asked "What's NFC?" — so the AI proposed adding an onboarding tutorial before the gate.
A tutorial is exactly the friction this user can't stand. So I did the inverse — I removed the jargon instead of teaching it. "NFC" became a phone-tap icon and the line "Tap phone on gate reader to enter."
A high-fidelity, interactive build in Michigan Midnight Blue and Maize, refreshed to a calm glassmorphism style. The live, tappable version sits up in the hero — or open it full screen here.
Open the live prototype ↗
The course let me run the whole pipeline inside an AI loop. The speed was real — prompt to running prototype in hours, not weeks. But every artifact passed a human checkpoint, and the checkpoints are where the design actually happened.
AI is a fast, fluent, occasionally lying drafting partner. It doesn't feel the panic of a dead phone in a crowd.
Every time the AI hit the gas,
I steered.