Cal Connect

The Problem

With over 45,000 enrolled students at UC Berkeley and a campus of a whopping 1,232 acres,

in this User Interface Design and Development course project, my team and I were trying to understand how new students get acclimated in their UC Berkeley experience, essentially

- Where do they begin?


  5 Interviews                 1 Focus group                   1 Diary study                     

The Research:

Why Interviews?

  • To understand the way students think on an on individual level 

  • In-depth exploration

  • Early Discovery / Generative 

Why Focus Group?

  • Peer participation + building on each other’s responses

  • Understand students’ sentiments as a whole in addition to individuals feelings toward their experience at UC Berkeley 

  • Find patterns and similarity in thoughts and pain points across disciplines

Why Diary Study?

  • To understand students’ "day in the life" at Berkeley

  • Understand students’ pain points during their day to day processes while acclimating 

  • Diary study was run for 1 week

Affinity Mapping for Analysis 

  • We chose Affinity Mapping to analyze our results to:

    • Organize and group different aspects of pain points 

    • Create & identify categories based off common themes 

      • This led us to identify that most pain points were centered around student acclimation related to Campus 

Findings:

  • Within Campus Acclimation difficulties, students reported issues finding ways to:

    ​

    • Make friends

    • Find relevant groups

    • Find useful resources to help with classes.

Turning Findings into Solutions… 

Cal Connect Homepage 

Finding Relevant Groups & Useful Resources 

  • Since we found that students had issues finding groups, we included a search bar in our prototype so that students can find relevant resources and groups

  • For students to organize information and prevent information overload, students are able to choose events based on timeframes without feeling overwhelmed by too many options

Search Events

Choose events and groups based on timeframe

Making Friends

Since we found meeting friends as one of the top pain points, this prototype allows students to:​

 1) Organize the events that they attend

 2) See what events others are attending

Keep organized and aware of events

See what upcoming events others have in common

Event Calendar

This would help make it easier for students to find friends with similar interests

Does this prototype make it convenient for new Berkeley students to connect with each other?

Validating Our Solution Through Usability Testing: 

  • Validated product concept 

    • 4 out of 4 people enjoyed product 

  • Unnecessary features should no longer be included

    • Some pages include both a search bar and an explore button, however, both is not needed 

Outcomes

  • More Cal focused color scheme 

    • ​Colors could be relevant to add school spirit since the app is for Cal students

    • Cal colors would be more gender neutral  

  • Include map of campus

    • Since our intention with this application is to help students get acclimated to campus, we feel that adding a map would help them get more familiar with the geographical terrain as well

Next Steps…

  • A larger and diverse sample size would have provided more varied student perspectives

  • Document the process more along the way

    • Useful for finding relevant artifacts that could be used to present research  

Reflections

  • Worked with group members to brainstorm topics, questions, interview guides, usability questions and testing, affinity mapping, and general plans of action

  • Performed interview, focus group, and conducted Diary Study for needfinding, constructed Cal Connect Homepage and Event Calendar protoype using Figma

Contribution

Princess Gordon

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