My team utilized the design thinking approach as a framework to guide design and problem solutions.

Empathize

Original Problem Statement: Students who want professional development opportunities through projects, you don't have a way of connecting with others and working on these projects on campus.

Original how might we: HMW facilitate the process of connecting students from diverse disciplines across campus so that they might socialize, innovate and collaborate on projects to design solutions for grant problems?

Part of the design thinking process, is consistently re-evaluating what the problem and how is helps your users. This original problem was not a true problem, so we had to find the real problem.

1:1 Interviews = 15

12 students + 3 faculty

Analyzing research findings using affinity diagrams

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Student Insights

1. Insight: Students consider faculty history/background important when looking for projects but they don’t always know where to find all of this information
2. Insight: Students hesitate to inquire about opportunities from faculty due to intimidation/ feeling unworthy /Not knowing the Prof. well enough
3. Insight: The perception of equitable opportunities is currently missing
4. Insight: There is a lack of structure in the current process of informing about opportunities and recruiting qualified candidates.
5. Insight: Clarity of project goals and requirements is essential for students to consider the opportunity and will move to other opportunities if information is lacking.

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Faculty Insights

1. Insight: The current methods of communicating opportunities are scattered across multiple platforms such as printed articles, personal websites and university sponsored job boards. These are not targeted approaches for student looking for faculty projects.
2. Insight: Searching for students with the correct skill sets depends too much on convenience samples and word of mouth due to poor response rates from opportunities posted on official platforms.
3. Insight: Monetary compensation is not always a strong motivator for students involved in projects.
4. Insight: Faculty have not figured out how to filter out applicants who lack interest, passion, or motivation for projects.
5. Insight: Faculty expressed the importance of students being able to articulate their interests and career trajectories so that they might better align the student to opportunities.
6. Insight: Faculty and student interaction is very important for establishing a connection, building rapport and trust which is instrumental in the recruitment process.
7. Insight: Getting students to adhere to schedules and manage their time is one of the biggest hurdles faced by faculty project leaders.

We reviewed our insights and acknowledged that students

• Need a strong incentive to work on anything beyond regular course work
• Need and want clear leadership and direction
• Did not find enough value in working on extracurricular projects that were run by other students
• Overwhelmingly wanted to get valuable experience and knowledge that would help them in their careers
  

Define

Summary Framework Statement: The initial problem statement assumed that students had difficulty connecting with other students to work on interdisciplinary projects.  Our research clearly indicated that students had no interest or incentive to spend time working on projects that would not serve them in their education or careers. As a result, the problem needed to be reframed to include the faculty as stakeholders in the problem and address their unmet needs as well. The results of the new research shows much stronger results that support the assumption that students find it difficult to connect with faculty on interdisciplinary projects and that faculty have a difficult time finding a recruiting students with the correct skill sets for interdisciplinary projects.

Reframe the problem

It is a challenge for faculty members, working on interdisciplinary projects, to find and recruit students with specific skill sets that differ from the faculty members current subject area of expertise. It is also a challenge for students to discover faculty that have experiential opportunities available

Design Opportunities

• Connecting Students with Faculty: A platform to facilitate easy application, project search and  students to faculty connection
• Provide clear project expectations ‍
  • Time expectations must be outlined
  • Deadlines should be set
  • Give clear indication of project timeline and anticipated effort
  • Passion and incentives are outlined: Give clear direction for what skills will be learned or are needed‍
  • Project types should be outlined and clear (filter)
• Communication Methods: Capitalize the communication methods students use.

University interdisciplinary projects lack a defined recruitment process.

Shifting perspectives and discovering an originally neglected stakeholder, allowed for a clearer problem scope, market gap and potential to generate a solution. By introducing the faculty and their interdisciplinary projects, the following student needs could be addressed:

Value | Incentive | Experience | Guidance | Mentorship

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Ideate

During this phase of the project, many different design solutions were proposed. Out of the many brought to the table, my partner and I decided to move forward with Idea 2 - Discover-Me.

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‍Introducing Discover-Me!

A portal for students and faculty members to apply, connect, and communicate during an interdisciplinary project recruitment cycle.

• Not the traditional job posting site
• Target method for connecting students and faculty

With Discover-Me university interdisciplinary project thrive, students and faculty members connect and opportunities are showcased in a way like never before!

Prototype

From sketches --> Mid-fidelity wires --> Prototype

A web application prototype created in Figma was used for prototyping and testing.

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Test

Two rounds of feedback were utilized

Round 1 - Sample size contained 3 participants total. Test sessions were recorded via zoom (cameras off, microphone on, screen shared). Feedback capture grids (right) were utilized at the end of each participant test session.

Round 2 - Moderators walked through the prototype and allowed participants to provide feedback in the end.

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Figma interactions were wired to allow users to navigate four main pages:

1. Home/Landing Page

2. Project Listing

3. Faculty Directory

4. Student Profile

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Additional navigation functions included:

• Searching and sorting faculty and projects
• Applying to a project

Round 1 Major takeaway

Users of the site are intentionally looking for current projects that fit their skills and interests, and they do not want to “waste time” sorting through unnecessary information.

Round 2 Major takeaway

Users like the personalized listing of recommended faculty and projects based on the user’s inputs. The information needs to be presented more intuitively and the search feature needs adjustments in order to reflect broader search terms.

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Annotated Wireframes

Click to view full annotated wireframe slide deck.

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Version 3 of the prototype can be found below.