To understand what students need as resources and how they gather them, we conducted a total of 12 interviews with both recently graduated students and current students. We made sure to have a diverse set of students from different backgrounds like STEM and not

I conducted 2 interviews solo and also as the team lead I was planning our next steps in terms of how we use this information to help us. 

How do our findings help us scope? I was a little worried about the competitive analysis given there was no clear goal of what we were trying to find. We were doing it just because Microsoft kind of told us to.

Competitive Analysis Takeaways

Competitive Analysis helped us find that there web tools have inconsistent content structure & pages are text-heavy.

We found a fair bit of more “generic” information on networking,
Job boards, etc.

Interviews Takeaways

We found about a variety of ways students find resources, ways they find networking useful, how important soft skills are to them, etc.

We noticed that there was a varying levels of “support” these students had from their universities.

Through the analysis we had found varying levels of “support” students had from their universities. We found that College of Liberal Arts students at STEM focused universities had very limited support and were under-represented. hence we chose to design for them.

I led these discussions and ideation sessions we conducted over Mural. I was pleased to narrow down to a user group which we could really focus on and we thus needed to research more on.

As the team lead, I pushed the team to conduct more research to help us find more specific problems that we could design for. I wanted to conduct another round of interviews with more CLA students but we didn’t have enough time. We had planned a focus group activity to get more specifics. But looking at the timeline, Microsoft suggested us to make our activity more “generative”.

I proposed a co-design with elements for us to get more CLA specific insights from as well as be being generative.

We conducted 3 activities, two focusing on content types and structure and one focusing on skills CLA students find relevant and wish for. It was hard to call it a co-design because it was primarily helping us learn more about the users. But it was also generative and led us to our final idea.

I led the co-design session either directly or indirectly coordinating/ conducting activities and driving discussions. I encouraged underclassmen to lead the activities with the participants and I’d jump in when needed. 

Found a Dilemma

We found that College of Liberal Arts students face this dilemma: While they know what they want to do, they don’t know what job titles suit their skills and interests.

Our design solves for this dilemma providing a platform to explore careers as a College of Liberal Arts major.

Also, CLA students either care about very broad skills like communication or very specific skills like a certain tool in their field.

Persona

With our understanding at this point we created a detailed persona which our solution was catered towards. We fleshed out our proto-persona Alyssa Jones with a more specific story and set of needs.

We excluded students in Business majors because we found that they did have a sufficient resources and direction.

We wanted to understand how the users walk through the process of using the site and comprehend the tool and features. We intended to concept test in the process. Upon iterating into high fidelity, we tested to see if the purpose of the tool is being conveyed through the design and to learn a bit about desirability of our solution.

I am very passionate about testing hence I was able to show the team how multiple methods of testing could be combined to test for the set goals.  I led discussions around what and how we could test and looked over protocols.

First version of our final solution.

Wireframes we tested and iterated on

Final product delivered to Microsoft

Final Takeaways

On a broad level, the feedback towards our solution was mostly positive; users understood and related to the purpose of the solution. Although, the solution seemed “ordinary” in ways. There were concerns around functionality of filters which need to be improved and overall there is some UX Writing work needed for the solution.

I suggested the use of instructional overlays (like one on the right) in form of an extended onboarding as a potential idea to solve for some concerns we found during testing. 

These next steps included takeaways from our final round of testing as well as some ideas we had to address the concerns.

I would have really liked to continue iterating on the solution but obviously I have to understand that the product we are providing Microsoft with is essentially meant for them to “match notes”. Their goal was to see how close we got to what they are working on. I was pleased to hear from the team at Microsoft that our idea was very similar to what they are in the works with.