Design Process

I follow the Double Diamond structured design approach to tackle challenges. This process helps to me to ensure I go through all the right measures to deliver a solution that meets the business goals and brings a greater user experience.

User Research

We interviewed 12 students and 2 career advisors. We also created and conducted 2 different surveys receiving responses from 42 students and recent graduates as well as 2 High School career advisors. From the surveys we found the following patterns in our affinity mapping process and survey responses.

Key Findings

• In absence of self-awareness, students often made a choice based on advice or pressure from a career advisor, family member, friends or society

•  Students don’t take into consideration their strengths, long term goals, industries that might interest them and how they prefer to study when choosing a course

•  Perspective students often haven’t had life experience to develop an understanding on the possible outcomes when choosing a course

•  Students don’t take responsibility for their career pathway because they haven’t thought about it or don’t want to commit to anything. They trust that by just going to university they will have a career

• Unfamiliar terminology and dense text in existing University handbooks makes information hard to understand

University students drop out of a course because:

• It isn’t a personal fit

• The culture does not match their values

• The curriculum wasn’t what they expected

• It wasn’t the correct pathway to their desired outcome

• It wasn’t the right time for them to take the course

Personas

Through the insights from our research, we discovered our key users were the “uncertain type”, that doesn’t know what to study and also relates to one of the three points below;

1. Doesn’t know anything about themselves

2. Doesn’t know the desired outcome

3. Doesn’t know anything about themselves or the desired outcome

Paper prototype

Our team wanted to generate creative ideas in 5 minutes. We then had a group review, critique and voted on ideas for each screen, and followed through with a group sketch of our paper prototype.

We had two iterations to our paper prototype which was tested with six users in total. Some of the findings from our usability testing included:

• Likes you can book mark courses

• Likes it gives u suggested courses based on the quizzes you completed

• Not sure about the search bar on the bottom

• Not sure deleting items in the quiz is a good idea

• Never used the hamburger menu

• Recommended to add a search filter and login feature

• Add a progress bar on the quizzes page

• Likes the slide interaction on the question within the quiz

• Like that you can book mark courses

• Liked that when you Login it saves your booked mark courses

• Likes that saved suggested courses are on the top

• Course page - list of jobs people obtained from doing the course

• Show pathways and how skills are applicable.

• Wanted a review of past student’s experience.

Usability testing with students at Monash University

Testing several users on our paper prototype we received excellent feedback and results. Therefore, we were happy to create a lo-fi wireframe prototype to test on our Monash students.

Feedback from testing the students with our mobile app

• Liked that you can bookmark the courses so you can go back to them later to sort through

• Included filters that had not existed previously when applying for a course

• Liked that a discovery course page shows possible pathways to a career

• Liked the layout of the pages. The students felt they were not going to get lost in the design.

Opportunities

• Various assumptions on what the ‘Studies’ quiz meant.

• “It would be nice to compare courses” Why it was chosen as a fit for you.

• If interested in a job, users would go to Google to find out the main things a suggested profession would do in the workforce.

Next Steps

• Course comparison

• See your quiz results

• Overview of job skills

Direct Quotes from the Monash students

• “Instead of spending hours and hours going through handbooks and Monash website.

• This is quick, easy, straightforward."

• "I would probably have used something like this."

• "I'm interested, I want to do this now"

• "If I can tailor a degree to my working style, my strengths, my interests, that would be really nice."

Future steps

• Desktop-friendly design

• Who’s writing the quizzes? This should be assigned to professionals within this field

• Adding videos of past students experience within each course option

• Adding video of university teacher’s insight in what you will be learning

• Chat bot feature to ask questions you have to past students or professionals