Shy&Sheer
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Art direction - Alex Kaminski
Design - Alex Kaminski
INTRODUCTION
This is a 6-week long group project with Carnegie Mellon University Director of Enrollment Services as our client. The final solution is a new dashboard design that helps with providing and digitizing new student onboarding experience. The design is designed to be incorporated into Student Information Online which is an internal student facing platform used by all students.
MY ROLE
User Researcher
UX Designer
SKILLS
Generative Research
Evaluative Research
Usability Testing
UI/UX
TEAM
Xiangzhu Chen
Elva Fu
Judith Leng
Zixuan Li
Ritu Parekh
Melissa Shi
Project Overview
00
What was the Solution and What Does It Solve?
A redesign of CMU new student onboarding experience through Student Information Online, an internal student facing support platform.
The Problems
Onboarding is the time period between students get accepted to CMU and officially start their academic career at CMU. During this phase, new students have many tasks that they have to complete in order to smoothly transition to CMU. For example, they have to submit official documents and complete pre-req courses. Students encounter many obstacles throughout the process.
Information decentralization
Information hub
Low process transparency
Status tracking
No support networks
Information hierarchy
The Solution
To solve the 3 problems, we decided to develop a new dashboard that will be incorporated into the redesigned SIO system to provide digitized support for students during their journey transitioning to CMU. The new onboarding service will transition SIO into an information hub that contains relevant information that is most useful to the students. Additionally, it will provide a status tracking feature that helps students feel in control of the onboarding process.
Background Research
01
Background Research before Define Project Focus with Client
What is SIO?
Student Information Online
Carnegie Mellon University student profile system
5 main features
Resources
Personal Info
Registration
Academic Info
Tuition
Initial Project Prompt
How might we provide better support for students with SIO throughout their journey at CMU?
What's the Current Support System Students Use?
11
Interview with students
4
Interview with staff
We generated stakeholder maps to identify appropriate parties to interview. We decided to interview both students and staff members of the different support organizations on campus to see how do students seek support, whom they turn to for support, and the logistics behind how support services are being delivered by organizations.
We synthesized our interview findings with affinity diagraming to identify some of the overarching trend and patterns in students' behavior and potential breakdowns in the current support system.
SIO is a system that students only use periodically for academic purposes and not personal life.
Registration
Tuition
Academic Info
Personal Info
Resources
I don’t think my problems are important enough to get help from my advisor or the CPDC or any other staff.
"
"
- CMU student
Students are reluctant to utilize on-campus resources as support because of the lack of instruction clarity.
I usually talk to my close friends when I am upset or have problems. They are more accessible than other people who don’t know my background.
"
"
- CMU student
Students are reluctant to utilize on-campus resources as support because they establish personal support networks.
New Focus
02
Narrowing Down Project Scope
The client was interested in the findings on student performance at CMU but was more interested in how students perform before arriving at CMU.
After discussion with our client, we brainstormed some potential direction we can explore in the pre-arrival phase and mapped ideas against impact and effort matrix. We selected the direction that brings the high impact for students and low effort for implementation.
New Project Focus
How might we provide a streamlined onboarding experience to new students through SIO?
Understanding the New Scope
03
What is the Current Onboarding Phase Like?
Making Educated Assumptions Based on Persona Experience
The team reflected back to what our own onboarding experience and went through the emails and messages that we received during that time to sort out what the process was like. We also reflected on our own actions to see how did we prepare for our career at CMU.
After synthesizing all the action items that the team went through for onboarding, we made some educated assumptions about the obstacles in this process.
Low process transparency
Information overflow
Uncertainty while
completing new tasks
Most information regarding onboarding tasks is communicated through decentralized emails from a minimum of 9 sources.
Extracting relevant information from emails is difficult due to the number of emails that students receive.
Tracking task completion progress takes a lot of effort because there is no established tracking system.
Current orientation does not provide sufficient information for students.
Validate Assumptions through Survey and Interviews
Problem Focus
04
Synthesizing and Identify Problems to Tackle
Picking the Battle
After two rounds of researching, understanding how students seek supports and the onboarding experience for students, we aggregated all findings and insights to find reasonable problems to solve with the limited 3 weeks left. The final solution should be solving problems that bring the most impact for the students on their onboarding process.
Information decentralization
-
Information is delivered through email from multiple sources
-
Students are less willing to use campus resources due to accessibility
Low process transparency
-
Tracking task completion progress is extremely difficult
-
Most departments do not provide updates on student document processing
No support networks
-
Students have not formed support networks that they can turn to before coming to CMU
-
Students feel anxiety due to isolation during the onboarding process
Design Ideating and Iteration
05
Exploring and Refining Possible Solutions
The team started with ideating possible onboarding screens for SIO. From there, we narrowed down to 3 most promising concepts, based on clarity and functionality.
Evaluating Initial Concepts
After combining and refining initial sketches, the team created 3 rough paper prototypes and mapped them against several measuring criteria to select the most promising idea to move forward with.
Click to see screens
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Understanding What Content to Present
The team recruited current CMU students to conduct card-sorting and co-design workshops with them. The goal of card-sorting is to understand students' mental model on what information should be presented together. The purpose of the co-design session is to see how students would prioritize the different tools and info sections.
METHOD: CARD SORTING
Students look for different information at different stages of interaction with CMU
METHOD: C0-DESIGN WORKSHOP
Students want to know immediately actionable items
Finance was a common pain point that was missed previously
Iteration 1
Based on the feedback we got regarding contents necessary for onboarding experience, we iterated on the initial concept to include these contents.
Initial concept
Iteration 1 - Full Page
Iteration 1 - FAQ Expand
User Testing with Non-CMU Students
To gauge how well our design would be for upcoming new students who do not have knowledge on what to expect, we reached out to our neighbouring frienemy, U. Pitt students and did our user testing with them.
Upcoming Deadlines and Status Tracking are redundant
Semanticsused is confusing
METHOD: 5 SEC TEST + DESIGN WALKTHROUGH
Iteration 2
Based on the feedback we got regarding contents necessary for onboarding experience, we iterated on the initial concept to include these contents.
Iteration 1 - Full Page
Iteration 2 - Full Page
Iteration 1 - FAQ Expand
Iteration 2 - FAQ Expand
Iteration 2 - New Home Page
Final Solution
06
A solution to Providing a Digital Onboarding through SIO
SIO AS CENTRALIZED HUB FOR STUDENT RESOURCE INFORMATION
To solve the problem of decentralization of information for students when they are searching for support during the onboarding period, the newly designed SIO also serves as an information HUB. Students can easily access information that is essential to them such as the status of their tasks, resources that they can utilize, and course and finance instructions.
FAQ AS A HIGHLY ACCESSIBLE AND CENTRALIZED REPOSITORY FOR STUDENT QUESTIONS
From user research, we learned that students do not have established networks that they can rely on when there are questions. Therefore, we incorporated a FAQ feature where a repository of past questions and answers that students had. New students can use this FAQ as a substitute for a support network to help with answering lingering questions. We also decided to have FAQ as an expandable side tab so that it takes up less real estate since it is not a commonly used feature.
STATUS TRACKING FOR NEW STUDENT ONBOARDING TASKS
Earlier in our research, we identified that there is a lack of transparency during the onboarding process for incoming students when they have to complete a number of tasks. This black box process leads to a lot of frustration. Therefore, to solve this issue, we decided to incorporate a status tracking feature in SIO. Since SIO is a tool that all students will have to use during onboarding and all the offices also have access to student info in SIO.
