Background & Development
Mission Statement:
Provide UW students (and other college students later) an interactive, user friendly, platform to connect with providers of experiential learning opportunities so that they can jumpstart their careers, research, and more.
Background + Rationale:
As a student at University of Washington myself, I have come to realize how we rely on a plethora of applications to apply for different experiential opportunities, this seemingly overtly-complicated process can be vastly simplified with my new application design: ConnecT
Competitive Design Analysis
Major Competitors:
Glassdoor, Handshake, LinkedIn, Indeed, National Research Laboratory, and many other more smaller platforms similar to those listed.
Competition Void:
Lack of an all-included, comprehensive application
Lack of transparent process, reviews, rating inputs
Overgeneralization and broad range of audience rather than targeting a niche
Why ConnecT?
Solves these shortcomings by taking the best design from each app and leaving the worst.
Creation Process:
As a result of deep and close collaborations with a few other UX designers working in the same project space, the persona exemplifies the unique characteristics of our possible users and highlights the services they might potentially desire.
Major Summaries:
Young Adolescent, current college Student
Trapped in an emotional state of loss, unsure, uncertainty, flooded with feelings of being overwhelmed.
Hardworking, motivated, and passionate about work/reserach in their respective field.
Personas
Provisional
Final
We have chose to utilize randomized semi-structured interview method to collect data for our user research.
Working with a few other UX researchers and designers, we have chose to break down each interview session into four major categories, from getting acclimated to our interviewees to then asking sharp questions regarding their thoughts and experiences with finding necessary resources.
User reserach
Results
Research Methodology: Based on the set of questions we created earlier, we began to investigate what are the needs of students looking to finding resources on campus through randomized interviews with students, we then compiled our data and results together.
Our findings indicate that top priorities include:
Up to date, relevant information regarding experiential opportunities.
Available through technology mediums and applications.
Easy access and navigation, simple and human centered interaction experience.
Through the process of storyboarding, we aim to reflect as our intended user, imagining ourselves in their position and traverse through a series of actions in order to achieve their intended goals.
What would they think? Their emotional states? How will they proceed? How are choices made at divergence? These are questions we continue to think about so that our product will be closely aligned with their needs and desires.
Storyboards
Some ideas…
More ideas…
User Journey Map
User Journey Map is used to document and visualize the process and steps a user to take to achieve their goal.
We combined our persona with our design goal and quesion, and throughout this process, we aimed to track not only how our user is thining or doing, but also how is she feeling, her pain points, and her emotional states.
A successful product not only let its users achieve their goals, but also aims to ensure that the process is smooth, easy, and not stressful.
Frames
Findings:
Overall findings were quite positive, with no major flaws or redesigns seemingly needed, for now at this stage at least. Here are some summaries from this investigation:
Lack of adequate numerical qualities of participants
Lack of time, need more time to support some of the findings or to prove more refutations.
Minor improvements on some UI design and placement.
