DURATION
Oct 2021 - Dec 2021
TEAM
Matthew Park, Anand Derick, Isha Tamrakar
TOOLS
User Research, Affinity Mapping, Visual design, Prototyping, AB testing
Problem
As students return to campus, Davis is faced with 10,000+ new students who are navigating campus and its student government for the first time. UC Davis's organizations and the government is vast and intimidating to many new and older students. Valuable feedback or urgent questions from the student body may be missed because they do not know where to route their concerns.
How might we create a platform that informs students about campus legislation and connects them with proper organizations to solve their issues?
OVERVIEW
What is ASUCD?
The Associated Students, University of California, Davis, or ASUCD is a student-run organization that provides programs and services to its students based on four pillars: basic services, media, advocacy, and social. ASUCD units employ hundreds of student employees who work hard to provide each and every student with resources they need to thrive at UC Davis.
Despite having such an immense impact on the student population and the overall culture of life on-campus, the resources and structure of the ASUCD website are not optimized to adeptly engage students. Over the past few years, UC Davis student involvement and attention to ASUCD have been rapidly declining despite efforts by student officers and senators. As a result, the programs that students take advantage of regularly — Unitrans, Bike Barn, CoHo, Picnic Day, and more — are declining in quality of service.
Our nation went through a phase of immense virtual dependence, and we believed that it would be extremely beneficial to take full advantage of these changes. Our team’s goal was to redesign and restructure the ASUCD website to improve the user experience and increase interaction between UC Davis students and ASUCD.
CURRENT WEBSITE DESIGN
The current ASUCD web page is confusing, directionless, and due to its poor format has many navigational difficulties. UC Davis is faced with over 10,000 new students looking for career opportunities and self-growth; however, students miss out on valuable opportunities as a result of an outdated system. We aim to create a format that is more functional and intuitive for students and creates a bridge between ASUCD and UC Davis students to bring ASUCD-provided resources to the students’ fingertips.
USER RESEARCH
What is the underlying problem?
To understand how students and faculty are affected by the current experience ASUCD offers, we decided to utilize a variety of strategies. Through surveys, user interviews, and behavioral task analysis, we were able to collect quantitive and qualitative data revealing the issues ASUCD faces.
SURVEYS
First, we started by reviewing an existing google form survey conducted by ASUCD with 53 responses. Through the survey, we were able to collect basic information about the students’ familiarity with ASUCD and their programs. This allowed us to understand which resources students felt were the most important to them.
We discovered that more than 72% of the respondents stated they were somewhat familiar to not familiar at all with ASUCD. However, when reminded of some of the programs ASUCD offers, this number decreased to 28.8%. This indicated that while students may not be aware of ASUCD’s impact on their lives, they are more familiar with the services ASUCD provides.
3-TIERED INTERVIEWS
Next, we identified the different persons that interacted with ASUCD. We decided to conduct user interviews to gain more insight into how students and faculty interact with ASUCD. We organized the interviews into three tiers and asked each group personalized questions to discover the different users’ impressions about ASUCD and relevant concerns.
This provided us insight into what services students use, how often and the issues they encountered. We also discovered more details about students impressions about ASUCD and how they learn about the opportunities offered. Through interviews with the intermediators, we discovered that many of them got their job offers through word of mouth instead of using the website to find job openings.
President of ASUCD, Ryan Manriquez showing Anand how to access campus legislation related files through the current ASUCD website.
BEHAVIORAL TASK ANALYSIS
We asked students to complete a set of tasks on ASUCD's current website: apply to a job, submit an inquiry to the student government, and find information about the pantry. This allowed us to observe the thought process of a student navigating the website. We discovered some pain points students encountered as well as which features worked well.
From our research, we discovered five consistent concerns.
- People don’t know what units and services ASUCD provides.
- There is an extremely low voter turnout for senate elections, most people don’t know when elections are even occurring.
- Due to the incredibly large worker shortage that is negatively impacting students’ lives — buses are overcrowded and the Bike Barn and CoHo have limited hours.
- ASUCD has a large intended audience, therefore difficult to balance stakeholder's needs & student needs.
- ASUCD is the largest on-campus student employer but students will mainly look for on campus jobs via Handshake instead.
IDEATION
How do we bridge the student to the ASUCD gap?
We realized from our user research that there was a huge gap between ASUCD and the students on campus. Through the interviews, we discovered many different problems and concerns. We wanted to organize all of our data and synthesize this into a format that could help us examine the problem space and explore possible solutions.
AFFINITY MAPPING
We took a deeper look into our problem space by creating an affinity map. When we organized our research we were able to group them into five different categories: Jobs, Branding, Appeal, Voting, and Audience.
After conducting affinity mapping and organizing all of our data, we recognized three patterns.
- ASUCD will benefit greatly from student involvement & students will benefit from ASUCD resources
- Problem is that the experience isn’t readily available to students
- Organize the information in a digestible way that is relevant to the students
This led us to our “Ah-Ha” moment. To Personalize the Student Experience.
USER PERSONAS
To be able to personalize the student experience, we wanted to first understand our users. We recognized that ASUCD has students with a variety of different interests, each with different needs. We wanted to address this through our personas to be able to empathize with them and keep them in mind while designing our solution. Therefore we created two personas based on real UCD students and identified their basic needs and pain points.
HOW MIGHT WE?
In order to generate potential solutions we came up with How Might We questions. This exercise helped us discover what features are essential to our application to improve the student experience. The questions helped us visualize the connections we could emphasize in our application to bring attention to different units. Through a mix of conceptual and tangible questions, we had a strong vision on how to bridge the gap between ASUCD and students.
LOW FIDELITY
HOW DO WE IMAGINE THIS EXPERIENCE?
USER FLOW DIAGRAM
We started by creating a user flow to guide us while creating our Lo-Fi sketches. We decided which resources could be grouped into which tabs to optimize the flow of one screen to the next. This diagram illustrated the set of steps it would take the user to find their relevant resources. Now, that we had an understanding of the essential screens for our application, we moved on to the next step.
LO-FI SKETCHES
In order to visualize our solution, we create Lo-Fi sketches. We discussed potential different formats and features for strong Ui/Ux. We discussed features and guidelines to ensure we were on the same page of how to personalize the student experience. With these sketches and wireframes, we discussed refinements and developed guidelines for visual design such as icons and component placement.
MID FIDELITY
How do we improve this experience?
Upon gaining clarity on the framework of our application we created our Mid-Fi screens. We decided to conduct usability test to ensure our prototype was following our goal of personalizing the student experience. We asked users to perform specific tasks on our prototype and explain thought processes along the way. We also got general feedback on our choice of words, colors, icons, clickability of buttons, sizing of icons, and overall design.
SURVEY
Users informed us the question was vague and unclear. The survey questions were not very reflective of the student experience. Users also stated concerned about how they might be afraid of notifications taking over their phones.
Consider:
How do you want to be notified?
How often?
BUTTON = CLICKABLE?
Users informed us that they couldn’t tell if buttons were clickable or not.
Consider:
How do we make this more obvious?
After doing some A/B testing and going through our usability testing, we decided to redesign some components and essential parts of the design system we had created during prototyping. We finally felt like we had a solid framework for a mobile app, yet we wanted to truly emphasize our mission: to personalize the student experience.
Color: Use color perception to create semblance between different pages of the ASUCD app. For example, make all the legislation pages yellow/gold while making all the unit pages turquoise. We did this to follow ASUCD’s current design system but added elements from our research in order to compartmentalize the pages.
Components: Downsizing to clarify negative space and ease visual tension, getting rid of negative pixel spaces, and creating centered alignments and proper margins.
THE FINAL PROTOTYPE
Learnings
Research - We didn’t have much prior knowledge about the problems within ASUCD, but learning about the power of research and digging deep into the problem space helped us develop a more comprehensive solution.
Stepping into the User’s Shoes - To really personalize the student experience, it was important to understand the needs of a student at the University of California, Davis. Throughout this process we would take a step back put ourselves in the situation of the end-user.
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