Enhancing the Purdue freshmen UX experience with a physical welcome box and a mobile application.

Tasks

User Research
UX Design

Timeline

November - December 2021
(4 weeks)

Team

Eileen Yan (me!)
Moon Jo
Vishwa Chandupalta
Faseeh Ur Rehman

Context

Class project for CGT 522: UXD Fundamentals at Purdue University

  • Background

    Purdue’s undergraduate UX program is designed such that first-year students are not exposed to UX-specific courses until their second semester of college. Currently, the mentorship program that pairs freshmen with experienced UX students begins at the end of the first semester as well. This lack of engagement with UX-specific concepts, peers, and faculty can potentially lead to alienation and isolation from the UX program. Our goal was to design an intervention to ease the transition for freshmen UX students between their first and second semesters so they have a greater understanding of the Purdue UX program and the UX field as a whole.

  • My Contributions

    Secondary Research (Comparative Analysis)
    1 User Interview
    1 Group Interview (4 Participants)
    Affinity Diagramming
    Personas
    Journey Mapping
    Wireframing & Prototyping

  • Deliverables

    We created a physical welcome box for incoming UX students and designed low fidelity screens of a mobile application for students to use during their time in the UX program at Purdue.

EXPLORATION

To understand the experiences of incoming freshman UX students, I conducted interviews with 5 participants. From these interviews, my team and I created a persona so that we could explore potential areas of need for our target population.

Evan, an incoming UX student

Goals & Motivations:

  • Make new friends within and outside of the UX program in classes and extracurricular activities. 

  • Prepare for his future career by learning UX methodologies and principles.

  • Integrate into the Purdue community as well as the UX community. 

Pain Points:

  • Unsure if he’ll enjoy UXD as much as graphic design.

  • Does not have a clear picture of what his UXD classes will be like.

  • Not sure if he has the correct understanding of UXD as a field. 

  • Anxious about making friends and finding a sense of community in the UX program.

 

Mapping the Freshman UX Experience

Throughout the freshmen UX student experience, there are various high and low points (represented by the blue and orange dots) as students go through periods of struggle and periods of accomplishment cyclically during the first and second semesters. We discovered that the low points during these semesters were due to unmet or incorrect expectations about the UX program that had been formed before students’ arrival at university. Here, we found an opportunity to modify students’ mental models about the UX program during the pre-arrival phase and the first semester, which prompted us to frame our design interventions around these periods.

View the full map here.

 

PROBLEM FRAMING

Freshmen are overloaded with impersonal information

To help first-year students ease into college, Purdue organizes workshops, campus tours, and group activities. However, student turnout during these weeks can be low as students juggle navigating through new relationships and college experiences. To help students materialize their expectations and goals, the UX program sends a welcome email that outlines program information websites, academic advisors, and career services. This impersonal information overload can result in poor (or no) decision-making as students enter their first semester of college.

Freshmen struggle to form connections in large groups

Relational loss is the concept that individuals receive less support in larger groups. I heard this sentiment repeated by participants during interviews. Because of the large size of the UX program, students stated that they initially had trouble forming meaningful connections with their peers. This inability to develop strong connections can negatively affect a student’s overall college experience, both socially and academically.

Freshmen have unmet expectations

From our interviews, we learned that UX students had unmet expectations about the UX program. Some believed that the program would have a greater focus on visual design, while others did not realize how iterative and nonlinear the design process could be. These expectations can set them up for initial failure during UX projects, which can further discourage them as they proceed through the UX program.

 

IDEATION

My team and I created an affinity diagram to sort our research findings, which helped us determine how we wanted to approach the problems we identified.

Initial Wireframes

After several rounds of ideation, we decided to move forward with a physical box for incoming students and a mobile application for students in the UX program. Initial representations of these ideas can be seen in my wireframes below.

To address the first issue: freshmen are overloaded with impersonal information, we proposed using a physical box with UX-related swag and personalized welcome notes.

To address the second and third issues: freshmen struggle to form meaningful connections with their peers and have unmet expectations, we proposed a mobile application for UX students that includes the following features:

  1. Group stories and a group chat based on the mentorship groups for students to connect with each other and witness what projects upperclassmen are working on.

  2. Student blog where students can post about UX-related content. This will help freshmen learn more about UX as a field.

 

PROTOTYPING

Physical Intervention: Welcome Box

Our physical intervention is a box that includes apparel with the Purdue UX logo, a notepad with UX terms, and a sticker pack with faculty faces. Based on the interviews and our experiences, we acknowledged that faculty and student interaction is what makes Purdue’s program unique, and thus the stickers are a way to build this rapport even before students meet professors. There is also a postcard with a QR code that will link to our proposed mobile application. These interventions are intended to give students a more personal welcome than the mass email they typically receive.

 
 

Welcome Box Limitations

High cost - The cost to transport the boxes to incoming UX students, especially those who are international, could be high.

Lack of interaction - If students forget to open the box or fail to interact with the items within the box, they could feel excluded from the UX community before the start of their first semester.

 
 

Digital Intervention: Mobile Application

Group Chat & Stories

  • A group chat feature would be implemented based on the existing UX mentorship groups. Each member of the group can contribute to a group story, which can be viewed by all students within the UX program. The opportunity to contribute to a group story is intended to increase student engagement within small groups.

  • We adopted the "story" feature specifically because of the success of Instagram and Snapchat stories. The precedent set by these social media applications demonstrates the success of low-pressure content that lasts for 24 hours.

  • The group story is also intended to lessen the unmet expectations that students have about the UX program. Because stories are viewable by UX students, freshmen UXers in their first semester can have a closer look into the work of upperclassmen.

 

Student Blog

  • To further address the problem of unmet expectations about the UX program and the field as a whole, we implemented a student blog feature. 

  • Here, UX students can create their own UX-related design posts. Furthermore, the authors of the posts will have their own profiles that include external links to their portfolios and contact information for further networking and advice. These features are intended to help freshmen gain a better understanding of the UX program at Purdue, as well as UX as a field.

 
 

Mobile Application Limitations

Engagement depends on student and mentor proactiveness

Student engagement within groups would be facilitated by their mentor, which means that each group's success would depend on the proactivity of the mentor. However, as mentors are probably enterprising students chosen by professors, this problem would be minimal. Engagement would also depend on the students themselves; if students don't contribute to blog posts or participate in projects, then these features wouldn't increase their knowledge about UX design.

Friction in adopting a new mobile application

There might also be friction in learning how to use another new mobile application. However, we tried to account for this problem by keeping the features simple and by adding a pre-existing story feature that users might already be familiar with. Despite these justifications, we still need further testing to determine whether creating a mobile app primarily for the UX program would be feasible.

 

NEXT STEPS

Moving forward, we would like to conduct concept testing, as we still have doubts about creating a new mobile application to host the features that we proposed as part of our digital intervention. Perhaps instead of creating a new application, we could host these features on a preexisting software.

REFLECTION

This project was different than any I’ve completed before, as it involved interventions that were not necessarily digital. I learned to better justify my design rationale through research and precedence, and to recognize the limitations of every proposed solution. Nonetheless, I felt that I could have strengthened the tie between the persona, experience map, and my team’s proposed design interventions. During my next project, I will carefully analyze the design challenge so that I can better judge which UX methodologies will uncover the most insights about the problem frame.