Introduction

In the Spring of 2021, IDEO and Beyond 12 co-partnered with Santa Monica College to give us a design challenge. They were in the process of collecting insights and ideas on how they would be able to help community college students’ academic success. In this project, I was assigned to be the team leader and to overview the design process, as well as being responsible for the UX researcher/UX designer role. We conducted qualitative studies to seek the problem and crafted a story to share our insights and concept. We also created a low-fidelity prototype to tested our concept to deliver the final recommendation.

Challenge

Find out first-generation community college students’ needs and design a possible solution that can help them to succeed in college.

Outcome

Wonderland, a student-based Q&A website. This forum empowers the students and welcomes them to the school community any time and anywhere.

Initial Research

Beyond 12’s main target audience is low-income students, first-generation college students, and students who struggle academically. Beyond 12 currently make partnership with schools and provides a coaching system (like a mentor) to prevent students from dropping out of college. Why do some college students drop out? I reviewed 20+ articles online and organized the review data in excel sheets. The excel sheets resulted in a total of 27 rows. I analyzed the data provided and highlighted the five main reasons students drop out of college to share with the group.

Research Paper Review / Defining target audience

At the meeting of sharing the initial research findings, we noticed that FGCS's characteristics might overlap the five main characteristics and reasons students drop out of college. To prove evidence of the assumption, I reviewed a research paper that describes FGCS characteristics, and it confirmed that FGCS's characteristics overlap the five tendencies with the initial research.

Domain Expert Interview

To gain updated information & deeper insights into the matter, I reached out to Jennifer Engle, the author of Postsecondary access and success for first-generation college students (the research paper I reviewed), and currently the Acting Director, U.S. Program Data at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, kindly welcomed us, and we interviewed with her.

Key findings:

• Because FGCS’s family is unfamiliar with the process and college experience, sometimes they don’t know how to reach out for help or what they don’t know.  

• The limitation of resource office opening time (Monday - Friday daytime) also not ideal for some students. 

• Students sometimes force to visit several offices to solve one task due to the complexity of the system and department organization.
  

Target Audience Interview & Survey

We recruited current as well as recently graduated FGCS. However due to COVID times, all interviews were conducted remotely, and along with the interview we conducted surveys consisting of 20 questions. Furthermore, we collected & analyzed findings by using Mural’s empathy map, summarized by creating a persona.

User Journey Map

Describing pain points with story

We shared our findings with a story. The video below includes users’ pain points and our draft ideas of possible solutions.

Sketching Concept

From the meeting with the stakeholder, we took turns to shift our concept to be more student-empowered. Our big idea was to connect the students to the resource better. I suggested creating a student forum website powered by Beyond 12.

Creating low-fidelity prototype/ User Testing

Our goal was to test the low-fidelity prototype to ensure the role of the website makes sense and is helpful for the users. Additionally, we monitored testers’ reactions to the idea of a game-like-looking interface.

How does our student forum stand out from the other ones? Why do students want to use it? Before starting to create a prototype, I browsed around other community forums online, such as other school’s forums, Q&A forums, FB group pages for SMC, and rabbit. I wondered if providing UI that is game-like-looking makes students feel more welcome. Does it motivate students to use it because it seems more fun and warm than other, more serious tone forums? Do students find it makes more sense? Those questions were carried out to the user testings with the low-fidelity prototype that we created.

Service Blueprint

I created the blueprint to illustrate possible operations. In the blueprint, We are suggesting Beyond 12 (B12) can create a website operation team and a support team.

Recommendation

• Creating a student community forum. The users appreciate Wonderland, as well as they are able to ask and review information among the peers and available 24/7. However, they wish to corporate the official information somehow.

• The tester reacted Game-like-Looking UI positively. They find it fun and exciting. The map can be designed based on the college map.

• They wish to customize avatars (again, they like the service that is personal), and some suggest adding game-like features such as “I want to see the avatar walk around on the map, that’d be so fun”, “how about rewarding the users when they post/answer questions?”.

• List view option (homepage) is necessary for quick access.

• Post anonymously options were well received by users. They find helpful asking question without feeling shame. “housing and financial question can be sensitive.”

• Words need to be scanned and return an error if it is aggressive when the user submits a comment or posts a question. Having a report option can be helpful to prevent trolls. Furthermore, research and consideration are recommended in this area.

Reflection

Collage is where people share knowledge. The story of the experience in college will be shared across the diner table and passed on to next-generation or other family members. Students with parents who went to college have the privilege of hearing those stories from their young age. On the other hand, FGCS and their family often feel a college education is outside of their world. “They don’t even know what they don’t know sometimes. That’s why the support needs to approach proactively.” That quote sticks out to me throughout the project.

Another thing that stood out was that students need the resources to be available in a more flexible time window. Community College’s offices usually only open weekday and daytime. What someone has to work for their family or to cover their tuition? Those insights helped me when creating concepts.

I appreciated seeing how the users were excited about the game-like UI. Exploring how the UI works in the mobile version should be the next steps as well as conducting research more about how to prevent trolls.

I was grateful to have the teammates that I had. Although we had limited schedules available during the eight weeks, we all are well-organized and have good positive attitudes. Mural also helped us a lot to organize insights.