Overview
Timeline: 4 months
Role: sole researcher and designer
Goals: Improve efficiency and intuitiveness of planning class schedules to meet graduation requirements
Constraints: WebSTAC and WashU class registration
Timeline: 4 months
Role: sole researcher and designer
Goals: Improve efficiency and intuitiveness of planning class schedules to meet graduation requirements
Constraints: WebSTAC and WashU class registration
I sent out a Google Form and walked around campus asking people, “What problems or issues have you had at WashU?”
I found in-person interviewing to be far more effective, because while some people seemed uninterested, nobody declined to respond. Some people were very happy to talk to me about issues they’ve had.
I asked my dad to post the Google Form on the parents Facebook page, a popular place to discuss WashU problems, for parents to send to their kids, and that got a lot of responses.
I sorted the pain points I collected into categories:
I considered which problem would be both interesting to address and possible to solve with a digital tool. While dining and transparency had the most responses, dining had just been addressed by the school, and transparency would take more than a digital tool to solve. Advising seemed like an interesting and solveable problem, so I decided to make it the focus of my next interviews. My classmate chose to focus on advising as well, so we pooled together our research.
Using the information I learned from interviews, I wrote down a list of possible users and a list of problems to solve.
I created two student personas and two advisor personas for potential users of the website.
One student is an undecided freshman in Arts & Sciences who wants to try a variety of classes and clubs. The other is a pre-med Junior who wants to complete all the required classes on time with good grades, with time to study for the MCAT and volunteer.
One professor teaches Graphic Design and enjoys advising but struggles to help students in majors she isn’t that knowledgeable about. The Economics professor cares deeply about teaching economics but not so much about advising, as he finds it time consuming.
I used these personas to think about what features would be helpful in a scheduling and advising tool. I also came to the conclusion in class that a digital tool could eliminate the need for schedule advising.
I wrote down four ideas for digital tools that could address the problems we came up with, and printed them out on a piece of paper. Then I walked around and asked people which idea they thought would be the most useful.
This method of interviewing got the most positive responses overall. People seemed the least bothered by it and could just pick one without having to say much. A lot of people did have additional helpful comments though.
“Schedule Sandbox”, a tool where you can drag and drop classes into a four year schedule, was the winner.
I researched several tools for building an AI chat bot. I learned that they could respond based on support content and custom answers, and understand complex content without training. This seemed like the perfect solution to problems with advising. I also found two AI scheduling tools that prioritize tasks and work-life balance, optimize schedules, and work for individual use or with a team.
I mapped out the user journeys of the earlier student personas by task and with potential wireframes, considering what features and layout would be ideal for the users’ needs.
I did the crazy 8 exercise a few times to create a variety of layouts for mobile and desktop for the features I came up with in my user journey mapping. This was helpful for thinking about how the different areas of the page would interact and how the user would navigate the site.
I chose some of my sketches to develop further into low fidelity wireframes. I used my personas, journey maps, and user feedback to think about which layouts would best meet users' needs for planning a long-term schedule with confusing requirements.
I made several mood boards including one that felt academic and friendly, one with the WashU site color palette and typography, and one based on my competitive analysis.
We went as a class to visit the UX Research Methods class, presented our research, and recieved comments from members of the class after they went through our prototypes. The class gave feedback on what confused them and what felt intuitive as they went through the prototype. They also gave suggestions for visual changes that would make the function of different features clearer, such as color variation, more microinteractions, and icons.
I made iterations of mid-fidelity prototypes based on the user journeys, personas, and user testing. Throughout this process, I considered the relationship between the AI advisor, schedule, and progress tracker and how this would impact the layout. I also broke down the user journey into onboarding, schedule building, and schedule editing.
After the initial testing, I expanded the prototype to include more tasks and alternated between making changes to the layout, interactions, and features and asking for feedback.
