Project Overview
Summary: An mobile app that would allow new incoming students to ask questions about school life and experienced students to share answers and advice.
I took an approach to situate this prompt as a response to the covid-19 situation. How might we design an experience to help new incoming students adjust to campus life in covid-19?
Role: Individual Project, UX Research + UX Design
Type: Google Challenge
Duration: 5 days
View My Design Solutions via video
Design Process
For this project, my process is following the five-steps design thinking process. To be simple, it contains Research & Design in general. As a designer, in-depth research forms the design solutions better through identifying the underlying problems (the real problems) and understanding on the groups.
User Research
Identify the problem(s) from the problem: Empathize & Reflection
Whom Am I designing For?
Primary Research: Focus groups & Surveys
Focus groups & surveys: New Incoming Students
Focus groups&surveys: Experienced Students From Universities
Storyboards: Personas&Identifying Pain Points Through Scenario
Design
Ideation Through Sketching
Paper Prototype
User Flow
Rapid Usability Test with Paper Prototype
Low-fi frames
Visual Identity Exploration
High-fi frames& Interactive Prototypes
1. Identifying Problems from problem
The prompt clearly defines the user groups: new incoming students and also experienced students and also it gave one scenario: new students asking experienced students questions for advice and experience. However, there are more underlying problems such as:
Definition of “new incoming students”, they can be freshmen who are just about to go to college. They can be new graduate/master students and also transfer students. The needs for them are different.
What types of questions new incoming students may ask? Is it about living? Academic or else..?
Besides asking-answering, what else activities can help new incoming students to adjust to the campus life?
In this step, I am trying to really probe the problems from the original problems and open a depth for my future design solution.
2. Whom Am I designing For?
I used to be a new incoming class of students and also a peer mentor as Learning Resource Center couch. So I started to ideate and reflect on what struggles I encountered when I was a Freshman and about to go to UCSD and what struggles I had when I was a master to enter CCA.
UCSD is a public university that has lots of population. My current school, California College of the Arts is a small art and design-focused college. For this project, I will focus on designing the experience for my current schools but I want to point out that different college/universities types have different arrangements to help students adjust the campus life because of the population and program different.
3. Primary Research: Focus groups & surveys
Research Tools: Focus groups & Surveys
3.1 Focus groups & surveys: New Incoming Students
Orientation is the current existing experience for help new incoming students adjust to the campus and also make connection between new and experienced students for most universities. However, the question is:
“ if the current flow works, why should we have a new experience?”
After Covid-19 started, most universities shifted their offsite orientation to online, I interviewed 4 students who participated in the online orientation in 2020 about their remote experiences. Some impactful quotes and insights from interviewees :
Currently, Orientation and peer mentor/orientation leaders arrangement is how universities helped their new students adjust to the new campus life and engage the experienced students together. I assumed the combination of orientation and peer mentors program should be helpful enough for new students. However, according to the survey I conducted among 25 people from 5 different universities includes CCA:
Only 10% percent reported that they had mentee experience and gave positive feedback about this experience:
“I met my buddy mentor who guided me through course selections. He is very nice because whenever I asked him questions via email, he would reply with care and guides. I think Stanford orientation is not as useful as its mentoring program” —Master student from Stanford
3.2 Focus Groups & Interview: Experienced Students
I interviewed 5 peer mentors who help answer questions during orientation from my school, and also 2 other people who had college orientation mentor leadership from Indiana University and UCSD to help me really stand in the perspective of the user groups of experienced students.
Insights and Takeaway:
INew students organized Wechat group (for international Chinese students), Facebook group and messengers before the orientations because they have very low expectations to actually networkings on orientations, especially on online orientation due to pandemics.
When there are questions, new students intend to ask peers via messages such as Facebook, WeChat or WhatsApp, and Instagram rather than emailing professors or faculties.
New students still attend orientation because most schools enforce them. However, they usually did not pay much attention due to back-to-back events and also technology fatigue of using computers or screens for a very long time.
For years and years, CCA introduced peer mentors at orientation but it was assigned to new students. This process makes new students feel passive because they do not have a chance to match.
Orientation happened with time constraints. Even if there is helpful information, new students may not be able to capture it. The consequence is they have to spend extra time asking other students and therefore reduce the efficiency of solving problems such as course registration and course plan.
The online orientation is overall compromising social networking and engagement. New students may not feel they “belong” to the school community even after they did the orientation due to the current situation
4. Storyboards: Painpoints through Scenarios
Due to time constraints, I focused on the two primary user groups new incoming students (freshman) and experienced students( junior or higher). I combined the personas and storyboards together and through this, I am trying to highlight the pain points for both groups. However, I do want to point out there is edge case I did not specify such as students that need disability accommodation.
Painpoints Identifications:
Financial Pain Points:
Students overseas had to purchase expensive Wifi services to access an online video orientation. [both user groups]
Productivity pain points:
The orientation alternatives did not help specific problems (i.e, course registration & Fiancial Aid) because it is too over-generalized, even though it was designed to let new incoming students ask and answer the questions. [new incoming student]
It hurt the attention span for both experienced students and new incoming students[both user groups]
Process Pain Points:
Online video orientations took very long. Students were not able to make through with the time difference. [both user groups]
In-person orientation would pass school merchandise such as t-shirt, stationaries, and water bottles to help students feel they belong. However, students did not feel they belonged to this school through online orientation. [new incoming student]
The nature of online conferences made the connection and networking less engaging and boring.[both user groups]
Support Pain Points:
Even the orientation was recorded, students would not use it as a resource for help. They had to spend extra time to figure out logistics and this was very disturbing and not efficient.[both user groups]
5.Design Goals:
This app should
Optimizing social connections between new students and experienced students in the period of the pandemic.
Minimizing the cognitive load of asking questions for new students and posting advice and feedback for the experienced students.
Making new students feel welcomed and belonging to the community
Encouraging the new students to be the next experienced students for the future incoming students.
Helping the new class of students successfully transit to physical campus life from virtual in the future when they are able to present physically on campus.
5.1 Ideation & Sketch
5.1.a Paper prototype
5.1.b User Flow
5.2 User Testing
Although time is constrained, I did not want to compromise the user testing. I conducted a quick paper prototype user testing with Figma to collect user feedback and optimize my design solution. Here are some valued insights I had:
5.3Low Fidelity Wireframes
Based on the insights from user testing, I modified my sketches and delivered low-fi prototypes with the notation of functionalities
5.4 Visual Exploration & Branding
This logo is a variation from the school logo. Instead of using generic icons, I want to deliver my schools’ value. Using a set of customized logos can make students feel welcomed even we cannot meet each other physically
5.5 High Fidelity Screens & Interactive Prototype
Onboarding
I tried to minimize the steps to take new users to onboarding. I found that before school starts, CCA students will receive their student id and email account, which can be default taken as login information for the first time. The ideology is reducing the common “sign up or login” at the first pace.
CCA is using workday data, so in the future development process, the platform can migrate the workday data to reduce onboarding steps for users
Asking Anywhere Anytime
The Home page is where new student users or experienced users landed on after login.
New student can start to post questions, search questions with related topics, keywords and tags and also view most recent questions.
Experienced students can apply “unresolved” filter to see whose questions are not being answered. Their contributions of answering questions, being liked or “applause” will be displayed on their profile board.
Sharing and Answering
Experienced users are able to answer the questions on their homepage and share their thoughts, advice and workshop ideas on community page
Profiles
Users can view others profile. On each individual’s profile, the system of “highlights” will motivate people to stay curious and stay caring.
Explore campus contaclessly but interactivily
I designed this feature to help new students interact and understand the campus and various shops. Before pandemic, each students required to take shop orientation before use the facilities. During midterm and final, the shop is always packed. There is a chance after pandemic, the shops and labs will be occupied all the time.With this feature, new students can have an immersive walkthrough of all the facilitations and potentially can benefit every students to take orientation wirelessly.
Experienced students can walk and drop pin or comment to introduce the details of each space. New students can also “drop” their questions in the space and expect an answers.Also, they can read the pins/comments dropped by others and it will be come “explore” highlights on their profile page.
Takeaways
It was a real challenge doing this design exercise along with the school midterm but I felt really satisfied with the process I walked through.
In the future, If there is more time, I want to focus on
Micro-interaction: what way will be the most comfortable for users to navigate in this system?
More user testing with inclusivity and accessibilities: I believe more iteration of user testings can refine the project. There are also users groups such as the disabilities and also LGBTQ groups whose user needs are varied. I hope in the future this experience can be more inclusive and adaptive.
Detail the “Explore functions”. What kind of interactions that users can do using mobile VR (Google cardboard) besides pin and comment?
Self Critics On Methods:
Building personas with varied dimensions can probe more problems and pain points.
I should collect more raw data from surveys and 25 people are not sufficient to generate insights.
Besides two primary and secondary user groups, what about the other user groups? (Faculties, professors, etc)
If there is more time, iteration on conducting more usability tests can help generate more insights about the efficiency of the new modules. For example, what are the design friction I might encounter when deploying virtual tour on mobile? If I am collaborating with engineers, how would I address these issues to make these functions really happen smoothly?