Students were interested in impactful work... but weren't sure where to start.
I found that information students, specifically, at the University of Michigan School of Information found it difficult to navigate the opportunities, networks, and resources they have access to surrounding impactful work, including work in community service design, social/environmental justice, universal and accessible design, social impact, and other impactful work.
So, I designed the concept for a one-stop resources, network, and opportunity hub.
The IMPACT project started as a solo project aimed at finding a solution for these students. The proposed solution is a web-based platform made to help students network, obtain resources on impactful work, and search for opportunities.
The question:
How might we better understand the student experience when searching for opportunities?
It began with first fully defining the problem through user interviews and a competitive analysis to understand what these students currently had access to.
Let’s first examine how they access resources now.
Initially, it was clear that students wanted to have access to impactful opportunities and that there were three major ways that they could access this type of work:
Through research projects and faculty networking:
The pain point here was that there was no central way for students to access the opportunities that were currently available, students would have to reach out directly which could result in many failed attempts.
Through the Office for Professional and Community Engagement:
The biggest pain point here being that at this time the projects being offered didn’t always relate to social, environmental, etc. kinds of impact and students had to vet opportunities to find them.
Through the University of Michigan Career Alumni Network:
This platform allowed students to connect with alumni but again did not offer clear opportunities to connect with alum doing impactful work.
I went on to define the design approaches that would shape the potential solution.
These approaches included Participatory design (the intention for this project would be to include people in the design process), Reflective design (requiring the design to be sensitive to values and reflect upon how the user’s values would engage with the solution), and a social interaction view (it would provide a platform for connection and to facilitate social interaction.
User interviews investigating the followed and produced the following personas:
Building a Potential Solution
The proposed initial solution included a website or computational resource that gives users the ability to search through opportunities related to impact that were directly relevant and available to UMSI students.
After the empathy, interviewing, and problem defining phases were complete, I began to develop ideas and iterations of what that solution would feasibly look like.
I iterated on ideas through storyboarding...
Then, I favored an idea inspired by User Interviews.
User interviews showed me one thing: students were having issues with finding opportunities, however, their biggest pain point was that there was so much out there that they wanted a consolidated platform to find ones that would best fit their interests, including interests in career and internship resources, opportunities, and networking connections.
I continued to wireframe a potential solution with those few features...
... and developed a paper prototype.
Then, tested it with users.
User testing included three participants going through the paper prototype. Users indicated several areas for improvement, including to add categories for filtering through events, people, opportunities, and jobs/internships. I also added smaller features such as a “back to home” button, a listing page for events and internships, and editing the search bar to be more obvious on the page.
The final stage of this project included a digital prototype and product writeup.
The "IMPACT in Information" website concept was intended to be offered to students at the school and include both local resources as well as school resources.
The intended impact of my design was to give students the opportunity to invest their time in their interests and offer the best platform for them to find something that matched them exactly.
Samples of the final UI product screens.
Reflecting on The Experience
The project concluded at the end of the year, after sample screens and a sample prototype were created.
If I were to design this again...
Considering this was one of my first projects in school, there are several things that I would do differently after being a much more seasoned designer.
The biggest change, however, would have been that I would have attempted, instead, to make it more integrated with the websites or platforms currently available instead of its own stand-alone site. Looking back, I would have liked to have included even more user feedback and user testing at earlier stages in the design process, as well as discussed with potential partners to make a more integrated system.
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