UW-IT Belonging in Community

COURSE DASHBOARD FOR STUDENTS
DawgPath extensions - data visualization tool that students can use to set expectations before they walk into class the first day, provide context to their interactions with classmates, and support a basis from which to begin building relationships within the classroom, both virtually and in-person.

Context

 01
For this project, I worked as a UX Student Designer for UW-IT Academic Experience Design & Delivery UX Team. I collaborated with a team of 2 other UX Designers to research about Loneliness and a lacking sense of belonging for students at University of Washington. We conducted focus group sessions, coded our findings and developed an initial web mock-up to present to UW-IT Teams.

Date

September 2021 - Now

Role

UX Designer

Need

Creating a tool to empower students with data about the makeup of their class and to support them in sharing their own community solutions.

Immersion

Research

02
We conducted secondary literature review on Weiss' Social Provisions Theory (People need 6 provisions to feel a sense of belonging in their community) and then started out with over 50 responses in our initial survey. We then conducted 5 focus groups sessions with 15 UW students from diverse backgrounds and majors as part of the follow-up data collection to better understand how social provisions apply to the UW classroom setting and to hear students' perspectives on how they use the classroom to connect with others.  We then coded our transcripts to identify key themes and sub-themes that represent their belongingness in classroom.
These are some of the biggest takeaways we saw:
Our insights revealed that instead of focusing on a way to deepen connections students have...

students belongingness may be more realistically supported by creating and supporting opportunities for connections to arise in the first place.
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Conceptualization

Co-conception

03.a
Result
User Journey Map
From the insights we have gained from our survey and focus group sessions, we decided to focus our web-app's solution on empowering students with a solution that they can apply to any classroom at the UW. This addresses the inconsistency in implementation concerns by leaving it up to individual students, rather than the instructor, as to whether they provide a solution or not. 

We then synthesized our findings by exploring a student's journey map from beginning to end of each quarter and found that there isn’t a lot of obvious free time available to them.
With this in mind, our team went on to brainstorm our design goals and improved on our original How Might We statement. Design goals help us have some scope and guidelines as we ideate. As we continue to churn out ideas, they would still be feasible towards our problem.
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Ideation
03.b
We took our initial findings to team CODA and team DawgPath of UW-IT service as they aim to be a tool that helps students discover their path to a degree via course and major exploration.

The DawgPath Team expressed interest in our ideas and they were hoping to further contextualize courses by highlighting data from students directly - letting them use this tool to discover their degree path by exploring others' academic context while using this as an opportunity to connect with their peers.
IDEATION SKETCHES

Implementation

Prototyping

04.a
Now that we have done ideating, we moved on to figure the user flow based on the personalized features that we narrowed down by ensuring that they coincided with our design goals:
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1.  Personalized homepage showing courses that they have registered/currently exploring.
2. Class Demographics for the courses they have registered for the next quarter.
3. Allowing students to share resources with their peers.
Selection of Interfaces
HomePage and Class Demographics

Review

Introspection

05
This was my first hand-off project that I worked as a UX Designer for UW-IT AXDD Team - I collaborated with other Product Designers and Data Engineers to consider the feasibility of data queries from our students' information database. We anticipate that this work might come with its own set of risks that we should aim to address and mitigate: Privacy concerns over sharing student demographic information. Particularly when it comes to identity attributes that some students might deem sensitive (e.g., ethnicity).
With this project, I made huge development in terms of qualitative data collection/coding and collaboration with other third party teams across campus by reaching out to present our findings/reports and finally a web-app data visualization mockup based on data queries provided.
THANKS TO UW-IT FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY

Next

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