Roles
Research Coordinator
UX Designer
Tools
Figma
Qualtrics
Adobe Aftereffects
Skills
User Research
Data Analysis
Ideation
Sketching
Prototyping
Duration
Winter 2020
&
Spring 2021
Due to NDA I cannot write everything on here about my projects. Please contact me here or at my email for further details.
Overview
At the University of Michigan School of Information, students work in teams of four with companies to complete capstone projects that highlight their skills and reflect the results of their time in school. For my capstone, my team was partnered with Terra Dotta, a company that creates software that facilitates study abroad experiences for college aged students at universities around the world. In partnering with Terra Dotta, our group set out to design a virtual advisor system that could be implemented directly into the client’s pre-existing study abroad software. Our goal was to ensure that students who plan to travel abroad are provided with a user-friendly guide during their international program search.
Fig 1. An overview of our project we presented at a capstone fair.
Fig 2. Our capstone project was broken down into three phases; research, design, and validation.
Research
The first phase of our project was the research phase, for which I served as the leader. My responsibilities during this phase were to plan and oversee our team’s interviews with stakeholders and to coordinate the development and distribution of our survey. I took on this role because I felt that I could contribute a lot to it, given my experience at Bungie.
Interviews
The first round of stakeholder interviews we ran was with study abroad coordinators and advisors at colleges small and large. We then ran a second round of interviews with students who wanted to go abroad, students who hadn’t been able to go abroad, and students who had gone abroad. We asked questions about the current process for finding a study abroad location, and common stumbling blocks that students had run into during their study abroad searches, and factors that might influence study abroad search outcomes. Our goal was to hear from people involved closely with the process to get a sense how our design could fit their needs, and build design requirements.
Survey
Following our Interviews, we sent out a survey to students regarding their experiences with study abroad opportunities. Our primary goal here was to understand what sorts of things were important to people when considering whether to study abroad. We would later use the results of this survey to design our search filtering interface and our introductory survey.
Insights
From our surveys and interviews with stakeholders, we built a research and requirements report. In this report, we outlined requirements for what our solution should do, personas describing different types of stakeholders involved in the study abroad search process, a journey map showing how stakeholders reported feeling throughout their study abroad program search process, and key insights from our survey data.
Fig 3. A journey map shows how stakeholders feel as they move through different steps in a process. In this case, the stakeholders are experiencing the study abroad program search process.
Challenges
One of the major challenges we ran into was understanding the full scope of our client’s needs and limitations. We were given a fairly vague description of the goals of the project, and then were set loose to create whatever would fill the need for a “virtual advisor.” While this certainly allowed us the freedom to learn at a good pace, we also ended up with some uncertainly as to the full scope of what our client wanted. Due to this, we made sure to stay in close contact with our client at Terra Dotta, giving him weekly updates with the progress on the project, the insights we’d uncovered, and our future plans. Building these presentations ended up not only being a good way for us to communicate with our client, but also for us to check in on our progress each week. Additionally, going over our insights and making sure the progress we were presenting was in line with the data we’d collected helped us ground our work more in our data. Thus, this challenge ended up being a learning opportunity for us, and we all became better at justifying our decisions to our client with solid user insights.
Final Design
Here, I'll be highlighting some of the key feature screens in our design.
In our final design, we created a system that allows students an intuitive and individualized program search interface. This system starts students off by completing a short survey that pushes them to think about their goals when studying abroad, and how they might expand their horizons in their search. The system then uses with data to generate an initial program search for the student, before letting them play around with a large variety of search criteria to help them find the perfect experience for them.
Fig 4. The introductory survey pushes students to expand their comfort zone a little while preparing them for their search.
Fig 5. The program search page allows students control over many different search criteria.
Fig 6. The backpack page allows students the ability to save and compare programs that they might be interested in.
reflection
This project was important for me in a lot of ways. Coming off of my internship at Bungie, I had gained practice in a lot of skills that go into the UX development process, but I hadn’t yet really gotten the chance to apply these skills to the whole process of a development project. While at Bungie I had the chance to make a survey and show insights to stakeholders that would then use my insights to make a feature, here I was able to take insights from a survey I made all the way through to a final design. Witnessing the lifespan of the insights I’d created was really illuminating, as I could see how they fit into each and every piece of the work, when they were important, and when they weren’t. I also had a fresh experience working on a team to do design work collaboratively over Figma. This experience forced me to get a lot better at communicating my proposals for design changes, and familiarized me with the process of design iteration with a group. In the end, I gained a lot from this experience, and I expect this growth to help me a lot in any collaborative design situation in the future.