Redesigning the Major Selection Process through Design Thinking
During my Human Centered Design Class (2018 Spring), we were challenged by Pitzer College’s admissions office and registrar to redesign the major selection process. Students regularly come into college unsure about what they want to study, and often switch majors two or three times before settling on a final choice. This is especially true at the Claremont Colleges Consortium where there is a wide variety of majors and opportunities to choose from, but because resources are spread across five colleges, students do not learn about certain opportunities later on. Our final product came in the form of an “Explorer Class”, a semester long class where students can choose and combine many different subjects and present a final project that merges these subjects together. We gave our final presentation, in the form of a sample course syllabus and a short demonstration video, to career counselors, admissions officers and academic advisors from the Claremont colleges.
Our Method — Design Thinking Process:
We utilized the design thinking process for this project to much success. For those unfamiliar, the design thinking process is broken down into five different steps:
The process roughly follows this flow, but regularly backtracks and jumps ahead in certain stages of the project. For example, after defining a point of view on a user, we would roll through an ideation process, generating as many ideas as possible, create prototypes, and then go back and ideate more until we are ready to test. This process is regularly utilized by Intuit who created their own version called: Design for Delight.
Step 1: Observe
Our first step of the project was to observe. My team and I attended different informational sessions for prospective students and took note of what they’re looking forward to studying in college. Many students reflected that they wanted to try new things, develop their interests, and become more independent. This process helped us to identify general needs of potential users and build an understanding of who potential unique users could be.
Step 2: Interviews
Following our observations, we identified players within the major selection process.
These included:
After defining these players in the ecosystem, we interviewed people across these categories
We found seven unique users to develop user point of views:
After much discussion, we decided that our main extreme user would be the College Sophomore.
Step 3: Empathy
Our College Sophomore, let’s call him Nick, puts an emphasis on building a versatile skill set so he can succeed in a competitive workplace. He also cares about maintaining an intellectually challenging curriculum. Using multiple 2x2’s we found that out extreme user needs to feel like an explorer.
Step 4: Defining User’s Point of Views (POVs)
We created three different POVs based on our other extreme users:
Step 5: Ideating by asking “How Might We…?” (HMWs)
Through our POVs, we started started to think about how might we help them with their respective problems. We asked ourselves:
Through asking ourselves these specific HMW questions, we were able to come up with a host of ideas. We began the ideation process by coming up with as many terrible ideas as we could in a five-minute period for each HMW, then we flipped around came up with as many good ideas as possible. We kept repeating this process until we had 100 or so ideas for each HMW.
Our craziest ideas included a special ER room for distressed students, international trips for students and professors to help them bond in new learning situations, and reformatting schools so that there is only one major offered per school. Some of our worst ideas include only delivering information about majors through snapchats and simply abolishing the role of professors at colleges.
To narrow down our best ideas, we individually selected our top two ideas three different categories: most surprising, most newsworthy and most feasible. We then selected ideas from this list to create prototypes for.
Step 6: Prototyping and Testing
Step 7: Final Product
We decided to focus on our last product — the Explorer Course, which put an emphasis on our main extreme user — the College Sophomore. We tested this idea through creating a mock syllabus and an online survey to gage interest. In total, we surveyed over 100 people across the Claremont Colleges, yielding positive reception. However, there were concerns over logistics and feasibility, which we fixed in our later iterations. Our final presentable product arranges for professors to teach different subjects throughout the same semester for the same cohort of students.