Campus Legislation
Awarded: Most User Research
Team: Kiara(PM), Isha, Matthew and Anand
Timeline: 6 weeks
The Outcome
To help better understand the relevance of the application we created we found out the major ways in which it would impact the student population of UC Davis and also created measuring units for each of them. They are:
Easier to get notified when new jobs available are on campus -> faster rate for jobs to be filled
Increase interaction between the student government i.e. ASUCD and UC Davis Students by making is easier to vote -> % increase in voter turnout
Providing students with a live stream of the senate meetings on their phone -> % increase in senate meeting turnout
Easier to hear our UC Davis students wants and needs -> more student represented change
Background
What is ASUCD ?
Since its original founding on December 10,1910, ASUCD has adapted to better serve the current student population. In order to do so, student needs have been recognized, validated, and addressed.
Recently, our nation went through a phase of immense virtual dependence, and we believe that it would be extremely beneficial to take full advantage of these changes. 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.
Problem Statement
What is the 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' organizations and 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?
User Research
What is the true problem at hand ?
To understand how students and faculty are affected by the current experience ASUCD offers, we decided to conduct user interviews. We recognized that in order to truly understand the problem we were dealing with, we must interview all the different persons that interacted with ASUCD. We organized our interviews into 3 tiers:
“Lot of students use ASUCD services but don’t know about ASUCD”
-Ryan Manriquez, President of ASUCD
From our interviews, we discovered five consistent concerns.
People need to know the importance of ASUCD to UC Davis's campus and culture
Extremely low voter turnout for senate elections
Needed more student involvement in voting and other campus legislation activities
ASUCD has a large intended audience, therefore difficult to balance stakeholder's (UC Davis) needs
ASUCD is the largest on-campus student employer but students mainly look for on campus jobs via Handshake
To further analyze what was the root of this problem we did another round of user research. We conducted Behavioural Task Analysis and asked users to complete tasks which involved interacting with ASUCD's current website. We also asked ASUCD faculty to show how they expected users to interact with their website. We reviewed an existing survey conducted by ASUCD to further understand the problems within ASUCD.
Ryan, the president of ASUCD is explaining to me how ASUCD expects students to interact with the current ASUCD website.
Ideation
Exploring a solution
We realised from our user research that there was a huge gap between ASUCD and the students on campus. We took a deeper look in to our problem space by creating an affinity map and grouping them into groups such as Appeal, Voting, Jobs, Audience and Branding. Through voting on the most important statements keeping in mind our stakeholders we narrowed it down to 3 insightful points.
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. We had to
Personalize the Student Experience.
To be able to personalize the student experience, we wanted to first understand our users. Therefore we created two personas based on real UCD students and identified their basic needs and pain points.
The two main personas we created based of our user interviews helped us keep in mind who we were designing for at all times.
In order to generate solutions we did came up with How Might We questions where after which we did another round of Affinity Mapping focusing on solutions to the How Might We questions.
Mathew, Isha and I spent more time digging deeper into the our solution space and figured out what fits bets for the users needs with the help of affinity mapping.
Our HMW statements revolved around solutions for the key problems that affected the communication between ASUCD and UC Davis students.
User Flow
Outlining the app
After visualizing our ideas for the app we created the user flow for application.
Usability testing
Upon gaining clarity on the framework of our application we created our Mid-Fi screens. During the creation of the Mid-Fi we came up with different variations to specific designs and did not know which one to pick. To solve this we resorted to A/B testing from potential users of the application. When conducting A/B testing we also asked users why they picked that particular design to better understand their chain of thought.
A/B Testing
Feedback we received from A/B testing and usability testing.
Users informed us the question was vague and unclear.
Need of engaging graphic or background. Not very reflective of student experience.
Users might be afraid of notifications taking over their phones.
On completion of our Mid-Fi screens we conducted a round of usability testing where 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.
Hi-fi prototyping
How did we execute this experience?
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 adding 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.
ASUCD Campus legislation app
With the previous changes in mind, we finally came up with our final app concept, ASUCD Campus Legislation: an app meant to help bring personalization to each student’s fingertips.
Survey
A survey meant to gauge and represent the individual perspective of each student
Background and Colors
Geometric pattern serving to “build together” and “connect the dots”
Home
The hub and central platform of the app
Facilitates and incorporates features such as favorites, updates and notifications.
Jobs/Scholarships
Interchangeable Jobs and Scholarship pages
A filter meant to further customize
Intuitive gestures and clickable functions
Units
Visual primers and bookmarks - a quick way to make something yours.
Expandable descriptions
Links unit’s official website for more information.
Legislation
Expandable senate - get to know your government.
Voting accessibility
Next steps
Creation of an on boarding process for the user
Working with ASUCD for possible implementation.
More time observing user behavior.
Takeaways
Digging deep into the problem space helps develop a more comprehensive solution.
Revisiting the problem statement during ideation ensures that we don’t deviate from the original problem.
Importance of putting ourselves in the situation of the end-user.
The three of us (A.I.M) presenting to Design Interactive
Matt, Isha, Kiara and Me!
Thank you for taking the time to read this case study :)