Designing with others
Getting students the help they deserve
The goal for this project was to design a functional, responsive website that would help engage a local community and empower them with a way to take action with regard to a specific issue. Our team of four decided to work with students within the Polytechnic Institute at Purdue University to address the issue of some students feeling unprepared for the future or the workforce due to a lack of resources.
My Contributions
I was responsible for helping prototype with Figma and coding the majority of the website. I have experience with HTML and CSS, so I was able to support our team by taking lead on the coding part of the project. Towards the beginning of the project, I helped with research by interviewing a student in the Polytechnic Institute and worked with my team in the co-design workshop.
Meet the Team
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David Levine
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Max Berent-Spillson
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Damaris Adeniji
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Azaria Dunston
Overview
Problem Space
The Purdue Polytechnic Institute consists of many different majors, which makes it hard for students to find adequate mentoring for their specific major. It is easy for them to feel that their needs and wants are insignificant when looking for instruction. While there are a lot of resources out there, it's often hard to know what to look for or even where to start. This can cause a lot of stress for these students on top of their other responsibilities in college.
User Group
Since the objective of the project was to design a website that helps a local community, we wanted to shift our focus towards Purdue students. Since this group was far too large and broad for our problem, we scaled it down to students in the Polytechnic Institute. Another group to consider would be the mentors that students can reach out to through through our website, which will be discussed further down.
Research
Secondary Research
To help Polytechnic Institute students feel more prepared for the future, our group wanted to set up a mentoring website designed specifically for these students. We wanted the students to be able to reach out to mentors who understand what they are going through as undergraduates that can provide them with the resources or what they need to address their issue. First, we looked through the Polytechnic Institute's website to see if they already provided mentoring for students. There was a page for peer mentoring, but the survey link to sign up was inactive. We analyzed mentoring websites that were not affiliated with Purdue, specifically UX Coffee Hour and CareerVillage, to see what features they had to provide users with proper help.
Interviews with Polytechnic Institute Students
After searching through Purdue's website and inspecting other mentoring sites, we wanted to know more about the experiences of other students in the Polytechnic Institute. Every student in the Polytechnic Institute has an academic advisor related to the program they are in, but not to their specific major. We wanted to understand how these students felt regarding their feelings about going into the workforce and how prepared they feel. To accomplish this, each member of our group interviewed a student and asked them questions about their thoughts and feelings about the future.
Interview Insights
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Students feel unprepared by Purdue for their careers
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Some professors are not as helpful as they could be
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Interested in connecting with someone currently in their field of study
Ideation
Co-design Workshop
While our research and interviews provided us with more information about the specific issues our user group is experiencing, we needed to focus on how we were going to develop a solution that would be useful to them. Our team reached our to a few Polytechnic Institute students to participate in our co-design workshop, where they would engage in a few activities that focused on features of mentoring websites. The first activity had the participants pair up and investigate some existing mentoring sites and noting what they liked or disliked about them. Our second activity was crazy eights, where each person sketched out features of an ideal mentoring website for eight minutes. Our last activity was drawing out our web pages on a whiteboard with help and suggestions from participants. The co-design workshop gave us lots of ideas regarding the design and flow of the website.
Website Analysis
Crazy Eights
Website Map
Prototyping
With the ideas from the co-design workshop at hand, we used Figma to prototype our website before we used HTML and CSS to code it. Our lo-fidelity prototype served as a reference for the layout of our website.
Click on the buttons in this Figma file to interact with our prototype
Final Design
Our final website features mentors that specialize in fields related to majors within the Polytechnic Institute that students may contact after creating an account for themselves. While creating their account, students and mentors alike include information about their education and their specialization through tags. We decided to use tags in the user profiles in order to match the students and mentors better. The participants in our co-design workshop also wanted to have access to resources outside of mentors within the website, so we included additional videos related to professional development and major-related tips for Polytechnic Institute students.
