CASE STUDY
Academic: 4 day Design Sprint for Brainstation in partnership with Ernst & Young.
Create an App featuring 7 -10 screens to address the needs and painpoints of a user demographic. Deliver a 5-8 minute presentation of pitching to BrainStation and our Ernst & Young Design Studio.
Pen and Paper, Sketch, Figma, and Invision
4 days
Hillary Carter, Elizabeth Desouza, Vanessa Tan, Patrick Wong
Copywriter & Presentation
COVID-19 has impacted every aspect of Coast University’s student experience. Being fully online means that student onboarding ceremonies, events, communities, and clubs will need to adapt to an online model.
Impacted the most are first-year students, who are at risk of not feeling immersed in the campus experience or a part of a larger student community, resulting in loneliness, depression, and other mental health issues.
We were asked to leverage any digital technologies available to reimagine the first year Coastal University student’s educational experience. We could focus on one of either International Students, Mature Students or Students with disabilities as our primary users. Our team decided to focus on Mature Students. The choice was strategic to meet the needs for a 4 day challenge. This demographic segment could easily be contacted and offered sufficient volume to rapidly provide the data we needed.
We were further asked to be exercise WCAG AA Compliance (accessible to people with disabilities).
The following brand guidlines were hard constraints to our design:
Our primary font would be Avenir:
The design solution would reflect primary brand colors:
The design solution would be by proxy reflecting the primary brand/logo as well
RESEARCH
We examined existing solutions in our problem space to identify pain points and opportunities for current online experiences. Individually we conducted research looking at articles from news websites and current existing online solutions. Distilling the most compelling facts in relation to our problem space we discovered:
We proceeded to define the impact we wanted for Mature Students. Our project goal would be to:
PRIMARY RESEARCH
With this goal in mind, we proceeded with primary research and interviewed and synthesized painpoints and motivations into insights from the challenges expressed by our user base. One of the most important insight we found was:
Finding community online was time consuming BECAUSE meaningful connections were not expected to be made online.
The most challenging part of our sprint occured between Synthesis of interviews and formulating a “How Might We” question.
We were tasked with reading interview notes and generating as many HMW as possible in 15 minutes. This was a tall order for novice UX designers, but being inexperienced, we also found the rationale behind creating our HMW’s nebulous. Why were were doing things? Wasn’t our HMW already clear from the challenge outline? Ultimately we collected 50 HMW statements and narrowed the field to 5, and then a single HMW we could agree on following dot voting and discussion.
In retrospect, it was clear we were aiming to gather insights to create causality statements (eg; “X happens because Y”) to identify opportunities of intervention for the app. But at the time we definitely didn’t understand that.
What was missed would be revisited and explained. We embraced ambiguity and settled on a more refined HMW:
How might we help first-year students feel welcomed and part of a community in a 100% online education experience?
SKETCHING
Once again we were called upon to act individually, but as a group, collecting ideas from existing apps to inform our solution.
We sketched solutions, shared them, and voted on what features best matched our goals in relation to our HMW. The key ideas with most potential from our concept sketches can be seen here:
From our sketches, we voted on features we wanted to see as part of the solution. We then storyboarded the user journey from start to finish, beginning by the student discovering they have been accepted by Coastal, to being informed of a fully online experience to the step by step onboarding and successful onboarding.
Our persona Alicia Howard would discover the upcoming semester would be a fully online experience at Coastal University. She is initially annoyed but settles on downloading the an app to connect with community as directed by Coastal University. Being an open minded person, she logs in with her Student ID, fills in user preferences and starts chatting with a classmate. After a while she decides to do a cooking class with her to get to know her a little better by shared experience. She ends the call feeling better connected to her new friends and is excited for her new journey as a student.
It was from this point that we were lucky enough to get a consult/check-in with our Ernst & Young Partners to discuss our progress and get input from Executive Creative Director Waleed Zoghby.
This experience was transformative and was invaluable for its insights.
After hearing us present our Storyboard, and explain our HMW question, Waleed explained that our design question was a little clinical. He explained that it didn’t really prioritize the pain points or the emotions of the user. It was then he specifically explained how our solution was lacking. Waleed said two things:
As a team we had a choice. We could ignore his advice and forge ahead. Or we could take the insights, pivot and try and help our user develop authentic, meaningful relationships through this online platform. What set us apart as a team and eventually led us to becoming the winning team of this challenge was the ability to admit mistakes, pivot and take the harder path to create a better solution. I was personally quite inspired Waleeds advice. Clearly the team was equally as inspired as we agreed his insights couldn’t be ignored.
USER TESTING
Shifting gears, we adjusted our original HMW to more efficiently emphasize emotional content. We moved from:
With this new HMW, it was easier to see how to adjust the solution to better match user needs.
Fully aligned on the approach our solution, we created wireframes and then a high fidelity prototype. It was at this point that we divided work to hit deadlines.
From Mid Fidelity to High Fidelity, Elizabeth Desouza and Hillary Carter visually developed the concepts into full designs. Vanessa Tan and I focussed on the presentation. Hillary would handle the stitching of our screens, while Vanessa and Elizabeth handled Asset Collection and collaboratively we concepted the brand while I designed the Waves Logo while and handled the Copywriting. The pressure was on.
Taking our High Fidelity Prototype, we sought out 5 interviewees who matched our demographic segment for the purpose of usability testing. The key insights we extrapolated were that:
We created two new screens in response. First was an onboarding screen to explicitly describe the goals and functions of the app. Second was a modal to let the user know they were being matched to create potential pods.
PRESENTATION
Strategy would be the most important part to delivering a successful presentation. The main challenge was creating a relatable and compelling narrative. This could have easily been problematic if our solution didn’t align meaningfully to user needs. When Waleed had suggested designing authentically around the needs of the user, it made presenting significantly easier.
I made sure to reinforce the emotional content on every page of our slide deck and script. I wanted to be sure the emotional perpective of “why” we were doing things was present in every step of our process. By taking this approach, no matter who was presenting, we would be speaking to the emotional needs of our user. We would be designing with a user centered approach.
For me the greatest victory was having our EY Partners explicitly say that that our team had definitively been the most user centered design. It was satisfying because that had exactly been our goal. We wanted to demonstrate the value in context of our user’s needs, and it was satisfying to have the EY Design Studio tell us we had achieved that. Overall, what had made this achievement possible was having a team that was receptive enough listen and do the hard work and pivot for the sake of creating a good solution.
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