empowering college students to discover new classes and careers
SideKick
empowering college students to discover new classes and careers
Role: UX Designer
Team: Amanda Lam, Paul Kim, Pooja Yadav
Timeline: September - December 2020
Tools: Balsamiq, Figma, Miro
Overview
How did you decide on your college major and your future career path?
Have you ever doubted your decisions or were unsure if your major is the right fit for you?
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Our goal for the project was to make it easier for college students to explore new classes outside of their comfort zone, and find new passions along with their college careers. Our passions come from the experience of being college students ourselves, unsure if our major was the right fit for us until we took classes outside of our comfort zones.
We wanted to build a platform for freshmen or students looking to switch their major. SideKick help students discover new majors and careers by recommending classes based on a filter-based matching algorithm and proximity of disciplines
Research Kickoff
At the outset of the project we didn’t have a clear mission or specific goals for the class selection experience. Without pre-existing insights, my teammates and I set on researching online communities and groups to find how high school students and college students at UCSD decide on their major and classes
Secondary research
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We looked specifically at how both groups choose their major, how they select their classes and how have they prepared for their next chapter in life, whether it be applying to colleges or applying to internships/jobs.
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We sent out a total of 78 surveys, and conducted interviews with 10 students from high schools, and college students from UCSD to help narrow down our focus.
Online communities
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Online forums (Reddit)
Facebook groups
Local high schools
UCSD Facebook groups
Methodology
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User surveys
User interviews
Affinity mapping
User interviews
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After reaching out to students who have agreed to participate in our interviews, we conducted interviews on 3 high school students and 3 college students through Zoom. During our user interview process, we had a chance to talk with both high schoolers and college students and ask more in-depth questions about their experience transitioning out of high school and starting their college journey. Here are some main quotes that we pulled from our interviews
Students are saying
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“I wished I took certain classes earlier, the skills offered would’ve been so helpful when I am looking for internships”
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“I didn’t even know that this class existed, it gets very overwhelming having to look at your degree audit, WebReg and the course catalog”
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“My friends actually recommend me classes I should take, but I don’t know what would happen if I didn’t have that connection?”
Research key findings
Most high school students hasn’t started their college applications, but have decided on what they want to study
75% of students havent started their applications, but 61% of them have decided on a major based on current interests.
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High school students want to know what life in college is like
Aside from official information on college websites, high school students want to know what current college students have to say about their college. They frequently visit Reddit for candid information and opinions on the school
College students decided on their major through taking new classes and personal interests
52% of students said that they decided based on their passion, 20% decided based on a certain career field, 13% decided through their high school classes
Many college students switch out of their declared major
After taking new classes, students discover new passions for new career paths and switch to another major throughout college.
There is a flaw in the current course planning system at UCSD
Many students wish that their classes help them more with their future career by providing descriptions of technical skills, some wishes that they have taken certain classes sooner.
Students utilize a combination of outside resources and campus resources when choosing classes
The most used resources when choosing classes are word-of-mouth, RateMyProfessors, UCSD WebReg, and CAPEs. Students also consider class difficulty and average grade received.
Key takeaways
Through our research, we narrowed down our target group of users who will be freshman and sophomores, as they are more familiar with a college course recommendation platform and high school students don't have a need to learn about college classes before entering college.
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We found opportunities to improve the current course recommendation system, as students struggle to find resources when they change their major
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There are also opportunities to create a centralized platform for class exploration based on student's interests, and provide candid student reviews
Competitive analysis
Before designing a product, I looked at current products that are already on the market and our potential competitors. I decided to perform competitive analysis on 3 other competitors, how users navigate their product, what problem their products solve and their main target users. I realized that the research process allowed us to come up with new opportunities for better features! Since none of our competitors offer a course recommendation specific enough for students, we can provide them with a customized experience that is comprehensive.
User personas
Amy
College Freshman
Major: Biochemistry
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Observations & Pain points:
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She came into college as a Biochemistry major but doesn’t really know if it's the right major for her.
Amy feels overwhelmed with navigating classes, making new friends, joining extracurriculars organizations, and clubs.
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Goals & opportunities
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Amy wishes that there is a platform where she could explore different majors related to Biochemistry because she has always wanted to be a physician growing up.
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Amy is also very wary of the class load, she wants to be able to balance everything and keep her grades high, but the current system doesn't provide her with how much work she needs to put in for each class.
Alan
College Junior
Major: Cognitive Science - Machine Learning
Observations & Pain points:
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Alan struggles to discover which classes are most optimal for his potential career.
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He wishes that classes would provide more information on technical skills offered for his specific career and peer reviews.
Goals & opportunities
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Alan wants classes to list technical skills that he will gain after taking the class, making it easier to take classes he needs when applying for internships
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Alan also wants to read other students' reviews after they have taken the class to gauge if it is interesting
Our design challenges
Looking at the key takeaways from our user research and creating our user personas, we came up with 3 questions that we want to solve for our platform, based on opportunities discovered from our research.
How can we visualize the interdisciplinary nature of majors and classes?
Primary
Interdisciplinary
How might we create a customized recommendation experience when looking for classes?
Generic
Customized
How do we encourage student's curiosity, exploration, and discovery?
Restricted
Exploratory
Low fidelity prototype flow
We built an initial low fidelity prototype on Balsamiq based on our sketches, focusing on the main 3 mechanism: a filter function based on interests, a report card and 'related careers and majors.'
Low fidelity user testing feedback
We tested our low fidelity prototype with students in our class, in which they provided us with feedback on how to improve our current prototype. Here are some key takeaways from our interviews.
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There should be a way to view all careers available
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College students want to know how they can get involved with a certain career on their campus
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Students need to know how a class will fit into their requirements to graduate
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There needs to be a better description to show professor ratings
Mid fidelity prototype
Home page & navbar: we changed the navbar to include careers, and a profile to view the user's saved classes.
Search result: Included 'Related Organizations at UCSD' to show how students can get involved with this career path
Signaling how a class fits into a student's graduating requirements, and include a way to review the professor without being biased
Included majors and careers as part of 'Interests' to further personalize the class discovery process
Mid fidelity prototype user testing feedback
We tested our mid-fidelity prototype again with users, and we got feedback on how we could improve our designs
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The careers page layout is too overwhelming for users because everything is so big
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There should be a better way to display the intersectionality of majors,
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Users are confused due to the similarity in the design of tags, links, and buttons.
High fidelity prototype: 1st iteration
We redesigned the layout of the 'Careers' page, shrinking the layout so that it's not too overwhelming for the users
We added a pentagon graph to show the intersectionality of majors and separated the design of clickable links vs 'skills offered'
High fidelity prototype: Final iteration
Product feature: Homepage
Explore new classes and careers with a card-style display
Students can easily discover new classes based on their last search, with titles and classes color-coded to the field that they represent. Yellow for design, Red for Business, Purple for Pre-med and Green for Engineering
Product feature: Discover page
Input your preferences to find best-match classes
- We wanted users to have recommendations tailored to their interests so the filter would display the highest matched classes.
- In case students didn’t want to spend time typing keywords we would provide them with buttons so they’d be able to seamlessly go through the search function.
Product feature: Class Report Card
View related careers and majors for every class
We wanted users to have a one-stop platform to see how many units were in a certain class, the difficulty, the average grade, and average hours studied per week. Not only all of the related careers are interactive, we wanted to display the best way to visualize related majors using a graph.
Product feature: Discover
Search for new classes based on careers and interests
Students can also search up Careers such as "Front-end developer" or "Video games" to find related careers, making it super easy to explore.
Product feature: Careers page
Search for new classes based on careers
For our Careers page, we redesigned the page to ease users in as much as possible, still keeping the color-coded careers to signify careers related to that specific field.
Product feature: Profile page
View saved classes and reviewed classes
During our user testing, our testers really liked our quick links, which allow them to have access to all the things that a student might need when registering for classes.
Product feature: Reviews
Write candid reviews for classes you have taken
We also redesigned our review page, making it easier and faster for students to fill it out. Using a step-by-step form, students are able to make reviews quickly from their account.
