Edu-Assist
Be in the know and build your career
My Role - Lead UX Designer
Challenge:
Higher Studies is a big step and no one would like to get stuck in a university or program that they do not like. Due to the abundance of knowledge on the internet on this front, accuracy is difficult to judge.
Solution:
A collaborative platform that lets prospective students connect with current students of any university. People can interact in the form of public questions as well as personal chats. To make this application more informative, we added an AI feature “UniHelp” that guides a student to recognize programs and universities that would be better aligned with their interests.
Result:
The application was successfully designed and tested! Owing to the large percentage of international students who pursue their higher studies in the USA, this would impact a large chunk of people. This app would also impact the American students as well as parents who make informed decisions about their child’s higher education.
WHAT’S THE CHALLENGE?
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Every year thousands of people from all around the world apply to universities and colleges in pursuit of their dreams and studying further to achieve success in their career. Every one aims to get selected in the perfect university and courses which will make their skill set stronger. However, this journey becomes difficult when one has insufficient knowledge about how to make such an important decision.
Moreover, for international students understanding the environment in a completely different country is confusing. Many times such circumstances lead to either a cumbersome struggle or a wrong decision.
Crown’s InfoLink is a flagship in fleet management and data analysis. We were challenged to come up with a concept design to enhance InfoLink’s features and benefit the Forklift operators as well as the Warehouse managers.
(Unfortunately, my team(Mia, Kartik and I) faced both - Mia was actually a visual Designer, but due to lack of accurate knowledge pursued HCI, an interaction design course. Kartik and I are from India and we know how troublesome it is to get knowledge about the universities and programs of USA colleges.) This made us realize that this lack of information is a major problem and can be solved using technology!
WHO ARE WE HELPING?
Students, especially international students, and lastly parents.
Our aim is to use technology to guide students to make the best decision for their careers.
- Primarily, we focused on international students as – they are more unaware of the surroundings, programs, and universities of the new country.
- Second, we focused on American students and
- Finally, we focused on parents who plan to gather knowledge to send their child to a good school.
Therefore we began focusing on:
- How to help clueless Alice to find a university which has a perfect program based on her interests and needs?
- Who will be the perfect guide?
- How to provide accurate answers about the courses and subjects?
- How to suggest Alice majors and programs based on her preferences?
TALKING TO STUDENTS
OUR MARKET RESEARCH
We conducted 9 telephonic or face-to-face interviews and a google survey to gain the scale of the problem:
“I would like reviews from current students, job statistics, assistantship opportunities, detailed course information before joining any program.”
“For selecting universities, I need to know about how safe is it to live off-campus and how is local transport.”
“Finding legitimate information from authenticated sources is a problem most of us faced.”
“I want to know about key professors and advisors so that I would have a good understanding of the program and can start networking.”
Using Affinity Mapping we organized the entire set of data and made ready our final requirements. We envision to create a one-stop solution for all aspiring students to:
- Find accurate and updated facts about all universities
- Connect with current students in the field they wish to pursue at the university of their choice
- Understand more about the specific university as a whol
- Receive help for the competitive exams for these universities
- Rankings of the universities Forums for the students to voice their views
- Guidance about important documents required during the process
Crown Equipment has many competitors and to give them an edge we wanted to understand their what their competitors were already offering.
We realized that all companies are:
We conducted 9 telephonic or face-to-face interviews and a google survey to gain the scale of the problem:
“I would like reviews from current students, job statistics, assistantship opportunities, detailed course information before joining any program.”
“For selecting universities, I need to know about how safe is it to live off-campus and how is local transport.”
“Finding legitimate information from authenticated sources is a problem most of us faced.”
“I want to know about key professors and advisors so that I would have a good understanding of the program and can start networking.”
Using Affinity Mapping we organized the entire set of data and made ready our final requirements. We envision to create a one-stop solution for all aspiring students to:
- Find accurate and updated facts about all universities
- Connect with current students in the field they wish to pursue at the university of their choice
- Understand more about the specific university as a whole
- Receive help for the competitive exams for these universities
- Rankings of the universities Forums for the students to voice their views
- Guidance about important documents required during the process
WHERE AND HOW WOULD THIS BE USED?
Alice would use our Application in situations like:
Alice is starting to worry about her future after high school. She has no one to advise her and no clue how to go about searching for a university to apply to. She overhears other students explaining how they made their choices all day. She finds out about EduAssist while riding the school bus home. Once she gets home, she looks up the website and creates an account to start her search for a university. Through this web application, she can filter schools by their location, degree programs, tuition and much more! There is also a forum/chat feature that allows her to communicate with current students at their respective university.
We created another Scenario where Mike, a current student interacts with the application:
Sometimes, Mike meets with students in-person to discuss classes or other issues students are having at school. Other times he uses EduAssist to get help with his coursework while on the road. He didn’t have anyone to help him so now he wants to give back any way he can. He also uses EduAssist to advise, encourage, and answer questions from all of the students interested in his university, athletic programs, and degree programs. When using EduAssist he only reaches out to students who are interested in what he has to share. This prevents him from having to repeatedly market to a crowd that is not interested and saves him time.
Alice would use our Application in situations like:
Alice is starting to worry about her future after high school. She has no one to advise her and no clue how to go about searching for a university to apply to. She overhears other students explaining how they made their choices all day. She finds out about EduAssist while riding the school bus home. Once she gets home, she looks up the website and creates an account to start her search for a university. Through this web application, she can filter schools by their location, degree programs, tuition and much more! There is also a forum/chat feature that allows her to communicate with current students at their respective university.
We created another Scenario where Mike, a current student interacts with the application:
Sometimes, Mike meets with students in-person to discuss classes or other issues students are having at school. Other times he uses EduAssist to get help with his coursework while on the road. He didn’t have anyone to help him so now he wants to give back any way he can. He also uses EduAssist to advise, encourage, and answer questions from all of the students interested in his university, athletic programs, and degree programs. When using EduAssist he only reaches out to students who are interested in what he has to share. This prevents him from having to repeatedly market to a crowd that is not interested and saves him time.
WHAT WOULD SOLVE THE PROBLEM?
Features we focused on:
- UniHelp: A machine learning algorithm for suggesting a personalized list of universities and majors
- Feature to communicate with current students: one-on-one and by asking questions on a forum called feeds
- A dedicated page for each university and its courses
- As an incentive for the current students to participate, we chose to award points to helpful answers.
Features we focused on:
- UniHelp: A machine learning algorithm for suggesting a personalized list of universities and majors
- Feature to communicate with current students: one-on-one and by asking questions on a forum called feeds
- A dedicated page for each university and its courses
- As an incentive for the current students to participate, we chose to award points to helpful answers.
WALKTHROUGH OF OUR PROJECT REVEALED
From our walkthrough with users, we found what was clearly understood and where issues could arise. These were a few recommendations based on our findings from cognitive walkthrough:
Onboarding screen - In cases where the user does not find the universities or topics of his interest
We should make the interest’s tags look like hyperlinks so that user knows that he needs to click on them.
Place the message button on user’s profile in way that it gains user’s attention.
How to post general questions is unclear for the user. Have some action button on the home page to post questions.
Final Solution : Low Fidelity
Final Solution : Hign Fidelity
HOW WOULD IT WORK?
WHAT’S OUR FINAL SOLUTION?
- User signs up for an account by providing basic information (username, password and email id)
- User then can pick whether they is a prospective or current student.
- While onboarding a prospective student, the application asks him to choose:
- Their interests
- Their preferred universities
- Their preferred locations
- Their preferred courses
- While onboarding a current student, the application asks him to choose:
- Their interests
- Their university
- Their course
- In each case, they are directed to their home page.
- For a prospective student, the home page is filled with feeds of the university or courses he has selected or its empty
- For a current student, the homepage is filled with the feeds related to his university.
- For a prospective student, he has 3 more options as tabs next to the home tab
- Bookmarked or favourite feed
- UniHelp: Where the application suggests courses and universities on the basis of their interests and preferred choices.
- Profile which they can edit
- For a current student, he has 3 more options as tabs next to the home tab
- Bookmarked or favourite feeds Responses, which shows the feeds he answered to
- Profile which they can edit
- The current students has a Star system, which shows his credibility. The stars are awarded by the prospective students who like his/her answers. This defines his level which is showed next to his name at all times, in all of his responses.
- The application has a search bar which is common for both the prospective and current students’ design pages.
- The application has a notification tab which is common for both the prospective and current students’ design pages. This has 3 tabs Inbox for personal chats
- Notifications
- Message requests
- Finally there are functionality to add feeds
- There are pages for each university and the courses in that university
We picked IPS Safety to be our solution. It would be a new device that would compose of:
DID THE USERS LIKE IT?
We tested the prototype with graduate HCI students to get a better feel of how effective it is.
Goal + Methodology Goal: To successfully have the user navigate the application with ease, understand the features and complete the tasks.
Methodology: The usability test had:
A set of 3 tasks
A task wise evaluation sheet for the participant to fill out
A survey about the experience
User Testing Tasks
Task 1: Sign Up as a prospective student who has decided to go for either HCI or computer science at IUPUI in Indiana
Task 2: While browsing, find the university, IUPUI, and the course details of Computer Science in it.
Task 3: Open the feed titled, “What are some of the best courses offered at Cornell University?”
Details of the tasks can be found here.
WHAT NEXT?
- Add a set of help screens before onboarding to give the user a jist of our application
- Add a set of screens to help the user easily and effectively sign up.
- Improve the basic look and feel of the application graphically ( font size and colors of the application)
- Redesign the application a bit to make the notifications button more noticeable and signout button not floating.
- Add a set of help screens for the current student as well, to explain the features of our application.
- Make the transition from the home page to the detailed feeds page smoother.
- Add more screens to the prototype to make it complete, like “add a feed page”.
- Add more features to the pages of the university.
- Add the functionality to shift languages
- Add the features where in the prospective students can consult with the current students regarding other topics like: Letters of Recommendations, Statement of Purpose, GRE, SAT, TOEFL, Housing and the areas surrounding each university.
Thus, we can make Edu-Assist helpful and guide prospective students for making the critical decision of choosing their future university and majors by bridging the gap between prospective and current students.
