OVERVIEW
OVERVIEW
Embedded Files
We partnered with the Graduate Division, which is deeply interested in improving the academic success and well-being of UCI graduate students and their programs. Our partners provided guidance, direction, and resources as we tackled this largely open-ended project.
Our project focus evolved as we learned more about our client’s goals, refined our primary and secondary personas, discovered problem spaces, and mapped user journeys. Our research ultimately led us to conclude that easy communication, community building, and peer-group support were missing as a centralized online experience for UCI grad students and that reliance on these support communities is key for both academic success and student well-being.
challenge
challenge
The number one priority of this project is to support graduate students through their academic journey and set them up for success. The COVID-19 Pandemic has had a dramatic effect on how we interact with our faculty and peers. Advice and resource seeking, peer support, and socializing have become increasingly difficult, emphasizing the support that students already need.
Graduate students seek community and peer support. Asking for help can be difficult, but it can be especially challenging to navigate through the hardships of the pandemic. Students are seeking ways to find resources, connect, socialize, and seek support remotely and all in one place.
ROADMAP
ROADMAP
PROCESS
PROCESS
We first took the time to meet our clients and understand their needs. After our initial conversations, we conducted ethnographic interviews with faculty and students. After analyzing the data, we narrowed down our scope and met with our clients to present our results. Once the clients were satisfied with the direction of our scope, we moved on to phase 2.
In this phase, we defined our scope. We conducted a competitive analysis, finalized our user personas and goals, and began to develop the information architecture for our solution. Then, we created our prototypes and conducted user research.
EMPATHIZE
EMPATHIZE
CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS: As we sought to understand our client, we decided that the best course of action would be to conduct ethnographic interviews with UCI faculty, staff, and graduate students to understand their pain points. We conducted and recorded all of our interviews online using Zoom, which were then anonymized and analyzed.
Interviewing Faculty and Staff first helped us focus our questions for Graduate Student interviews by narrowing in on and understanding
pain points and essential user journeys. Interviewing graduate programs Faculty and Staff produced two sets of personas, and potential scopes, and helped us understand overarching user journeys, like admissions, funding, financial aid, and graduation.
This also allowed us to make sure we had good coverage and a diverse set of participants across our personas.
Customer segmentation
Customer segmentation
Students
Graduate degree students - seeking camaraderie within shared interest communities.
Online degree students - yearning for connections and a glimpse of traditional campus friendships.
Advanced research students - seeking a centralized platform for funding and collaborative projects.
Faculty & Staff
Staff - Educational mentors like Advisors, Professors
Heads - Academic leaders Chair, Dean
Admin - Administrative support managing.
personaS
personaS
DEFINE
DEFINE
After analyzing the interview data, we had several directions for our project. Breaking out specific scenarios pulled from our interviews and building a “how might we” statement helped us narrow some ideas. Our final problem statement establishes a clear direction that helps bring together problems faced by students.
How might we help graduate students who feel lost accessing different on-campus communities?
Based on our research, we found that many of the interviewees relied heavily on their cohort and peers to support them during their academic journey. So we focused on creating an online community for UCI graduate students, providing a safe and confidential space to share interests, resources, and support with their respective peers and communities.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
We conducted a competitive analysis of various community/communication platforms to understand our market and competitors. For our analysis, we created a high-level overview of the different types of platform features. Then we were able to identify a list of common features throughout the analyzed platform. From this list, we used our interview data to prioritize the features that would help solve our users’ needs.
Finally, based on the features identified, we dove deeper into market leaders and innovators to help guide our design strategy.
Evaluating the target features was the most important aspect of the competitive analysis since that data would drive the direction of our design and were deemed as the most important features to help solve user problems.
Feature refinement:
Each successive exercise let us narrow in on the features we wanted to highlight.
We also discovered exciting ideas for features for the future.
Further research and interview data identified these top five target features to solve our user’s problems
TARGET FEATURES
Groups: Find or create secure peer groups for both social and academic feedback
Authentication: Confidence in privacy and security through SSO
Personalized News Feed: Content based on group interests
Posting with Anonymous: The Option to post or comment in groups anonymously
Chat: direct and group messaging with peers
IDEATION AND PROTOTYPING
IDEATION AND PROTOTYPING
STORY BOARD
STORY BOARD
USER STORIES & ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA
USER STORIES & ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA
USER STORY1:
As a graduate student, I want to know about all the different interest groups within the university in one place so that I can decide which ones to join based on my interests.
ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA:
The app shall list all the on-campus groups for the students to browse.
The app shall help users to search for any group.
The app shall take users to the group selection page after they log in using UCI credentials
USER STORY2:
As a graduate student, I want to join various on-campus groups so that I can be connected with my peers and community.
ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA:
The app shall allow the selection of at most 15 groups for the user to join.
The app shall allow the user to revert their selection.
When the user has logged in for the first time the app shall allow the user to add the program group as the default group.
When the user has logged in for the first time the app shall prompt to add at least 2 groups.
USER STORY3:
As a graduate student, I want to post and reply anonymously in a group so that I can share information and express myself without any fear.
ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA:
The app shall support the post creation with and without an anonymous setting.
The app shall hide the author of anonymous posts/replies from other members and group admins.
The app shall trace the anonymous author in case of abuse or misuse of the platform.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
customer journey
customer journey
USABILITY TESTING
USABILITY TESTING
Conducted with a low-fidelity prototype, we developed two scenarios and came up with several tasks that participants completed during the usability test. Through the test, participants were asked to speak their thoughts aloud. After each task, they then answered qualitative and quantitative questions regarding their first impressions and experiences.
After completing all of their tasks, participants answered a post-test questionnaire that evaluated the overall experience of the application.
MVP
MVP
A high-fidelity prototype was designed in Figma.
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