Challenge
Your school is gearing up to welcome a new incoming class and would like to help them adjust to campus life. Design an experience that allows new students to ask questions about the school life, and experienced students to share answers and advice. Consider the needs of a student who has questions, and the experience for a student who would like to give advice.
Introduction
The way in which we welcome new students has drastically differed from before the pandemic era and will change even post-pandemic. However, the issues new students face with adjusting to campus are often the same issues experienced students have already dealt with. This project provided a great opportunity to design a solution for problems I see and personally experience everyday as a remote-learning college student.
I’ll dive deeper into the design process that I followed to complete this design exercise, and explain my thought process behind each essential decision I made.
This is the design process that I followed over the 7 day period. Similarly, I will split up my presentation into 3 main parts: Think, Make, and Check. The idea behind each of these simple stages is to think broadly about the challenge space then converge those ideas into compact, yet effective, insights.
Think
Challenge
As mentioned above, the challenge was to design an experience that allows new students to ask questions about the school life, and experienced students to share answers and advice.
Being a new college student at a new campus with new peers can be over-whelming and tough to manage, so having questions answered by experienced students is a great way of facilitating adjustment to new campus life and building healthy connections with peers.
Research + Discover
However, in order to pinpoint the frustrations and motivations, I conducted user interviews, secondary and market research . I explored the general consensus from online sources and noted my initial thoughts. Specifically, I looked into the frustrations that new students have with adjusting to campus life during in-person and remote learning. I also looked into the motivations and pain points experienced students have with providing advice to new students. I roughly noted the features I thought could be useful in solving the common problems I noticed.
In Fall 2020, USC welcomed 8,753 freshmen to the entire student body population of 46,000 students.
That same year, 71% of college students have indicated increased stress and anxiety due to the pandemic and from decreased social interactions and increased concerns on academic performance.
USC has a lot of new students each year, and with the stress and anxiety of remote learning, many students have become more isolated than ever, often adopting negative coping mechanisms. From user interviews, I noticed a trend of feeling confused as to where answers could be found and where focused conversations about campus life could be initiated.
Main takeaways: Initial adjustment to campus can be lonely and overwhelming (with classes, social life, etc.). That added stress negatively affects mental health. University apps/websites usually provide essential information and resources but not in a concise or conversational manner.
Narrowing the scope
In order to develop an effective and compact solution, I narrowed the scope of my problem space to first address a specific scenario which will better address the primary user needs. Then, I will broaden my scope to ensure my solution addresses the other user needs.
Primary scenario: New students looking for advice on what courses to take and how to register for those courses. They are looking for advice on how to balance course requirements with their social lives, personal interests, and extracurricular activities. However, they are not sure who can answer all of these questions or where to get this information.
Journey Map + Persona
Visualizing the frustrations and motivations of my primary user journey more clearly lays out the touchpoints and narrative that new students experience with finding advice.
Motivations: Students prefer to address their personal questions through conversation because it allows for follow-up and elaboration of their situation.
Frustrations: New students look for advice from experienced students because they most likely have first-hand experience, but often don’t have the connections to initiate those conversations.
These painpoints reinforce the need for my design solution to be accessible, efficient, and personal.
Defining the Problem
Before designing a platform that addresses the main frustrations from my research, I converged my research insights to identify the root causes.
Because there is a lack of opportunity for focused conversations between new students and their experienced peers, new students turn to online resources for information which are often too broad and provide an overwhelming amount of information. And because new students are busy and are not experienced with navigating all of the university’s resources, students often lack the fast and direct answers they need to easily adjust to their campus’ course registration system, social life, and beyond. This can be especially overwhelming if students are going at it alone or feel uncomfortable asking their peers for help. However, their upperclassmen peers often know exactly what they are experiencing, but just don’t have a platform to share that experience or reach out with advice.
So what are the biggest underlying issues to tackle?
- Lack of interaction and personal conversation (due to the pandemic or lack of opportunities present) between new students and their peers
- Insufficient methods of getting quick and direct answers to questions about the university or campus life in general
- A disconnected community where incoming students lack the connections and confidence to reach out to experienced students
Ideate
I briefly ideated and grouped my main features to develop the skeleton of my app, ultimately forming three main aspects. I defined features that I thought would fulfill the primary user needs, as well as the pain points I discovered during user research. Keeping in mind a focus on accessibility, I developed ideas that would be understandable and applicable for all types of students and backgrounds, encouraging both group and personal connections.
Make
Defining the Product Vision
So what do I hope to achieve? I’m looking to create an app that makes asking questions easier and receiving answers faster. This platform will streamline the necessary information new students need to adjust to campus life with the personal assistance of a peer-to-peer chat feature.
Creating a collaborative and social atmosphere for new students to connect with their peers, based on personal preferences and background, is not only beneficial for their school life, but important for fostering healthy mental awareness.
This will be achieved through these design goals:
- real-time (live) questions and answers by trusted students and advisors
- a way to connect with other students (share experiences, struggles, and advice) and campus organizations
- streamlined platform for campus information/events integrated with personal calendar and apps
The main feature benefits:
Primary User Flow
System Rationale
The main idea behind this circular user flow is that by first encouraging group interactions, new students can get to know a wide range of students with similar interests and passions. Then, after fostering those initial connections, new students can feel more comfortable reaching out to set up 1-on-1 chats with other group members. Ultimately, those new students will now have the resources and confidence to reach out to other students (and friends) to initiate a more interconnected student community.
Instead of classifying students as new or experienced, I am looking to design an atmosphere where students, incoming or not, can ask each other questions and help to develop a culture of interconnection and shared experiences.
Wireframes
Sketches + Initial Wireframe
With a clear idea of the structure, information, and actions of the app, I jumped into wireframing my sketches.
I tried to place the features in a logical flow at this point, but as I move into higher-fidelity wireframes, I expect to move some features around.
Ultimately, I defined 4 main aspects of the app:
1 Onboarding: for the app to gather information for a more personalized experience
2 Home/Explore: for the user to explore posts and ask questions
3 Connect: for the user to connect with their peers and form healthy relationships
4 Chat: for the user to send and receive live messages with other students, advisors, and mentors.
I translated my sketches into mid-fidelity wireframes, using Whimsical, in order to better visualize the app. I focused on determining the information the app would gather from the user and what the app would then present with that infromation. This was a simple and fast way of structuring the entire app and the visual hierarchy I was looking to achieve. I kept in mind the three main design goals I set for this app: personal, social, and efficient.
Personal
By having 1-on-1 chats with other students, advisors, and mentors while also having the ability to join live chats with organizations on campus, this platform creates a more personal experience.
Social
By implementing a social network into the university’s Q&A system, this platform not only allows students to ask and receive answers to questions, but also connect with their peers.
Efficient
By implementing the abilty to immediately chat with an advisor or directly post a question to a feed, this platform streamlines the process for new students to ask questions about campus life and receive answers.
Visual Design System
Finally, in order to start prototyping, I developed the design system that I incoporated throughout the app for consistency and understandability. Sticking with USC colors for brand recognition and for some school spirit :).
Mockups
I decided to mockup only the most essential pages for the app, due to the strict time limitation, but also to make the primary user journey clear, which was to facilitate interpersonal collaboration within the community through group and personal interaction.
Check
Usability Testing
After finishing my mockups, I conducted usability testing with a couple of my friends at USC to see if the flow and concept of my design made sense. I simply presented each page and got feedback on what they would do next with the options presented.
Main Takeaways from Testing:
- The chat feature is missing in the mockups which cuts the user journey short. Because this app focuses on “live” interactions, that feature is significant to the end goal.
- How do I ensure students questions get answered? Is there a way to “bump” the questions or “re-post” it?
- Overall, the flow is cohesive and well thought out. The tools implemented are useful for solving actual problems that new students face when adjusting to campus life at USC.
Validate and Adapt
Usability testing validated many of the app’s features and the overall strength of the flow to accomplish user needs. However, with the feedback I got, I needed to decide what the most important changes to make were, due to the time constraint. I decided that it was most important for the flow to be complete, so I finished my design process by completing the chat feature, which was initially missing from my mockups.
Evaluate + Takeaways
Overall, I believe I designed an experience that achieves the initial goal: to allow new students to ask questions and for experienced students to answer them. However, I believe that I also took it a step further and identified the cyclical issue incoming students have each year, and turned those painpoints into my app’s main focus of encouraging a more interconnected community through live interactions.
From this experience, I learned that designing by myself is hard. I usually rely on collaboration and feedback to iterate and refine my ideas and my designs. This experience taught me that if I can’t collaborate with others, then understanding the user through research and interviews is the best way to reinforce my design decisions.
If I had more time, I would return to my research insights and my user needs to further narrow down my solution to be more compact and efficient. I would also like to integrate more of Google’s tools into my solution and work my design into the Google ecosystem.
