Final Bell: Sharpening Our Vision
Narrowing In
In our last post, we discussed our two-goal strategy: helping students learn about themselves and aiding them in exploring and selecting courses. Now, after fruitful exploration of both goals in separate sprints, our work on identity stands out to us as very promising in helping students better understand themselves, creating a ripple effect that helps them better leverage the information available to them, and encourages them to choose classes that feel authentic to their learning journey, even with the information in the current form. Therefore, we’ve decided to pivot our strategy away from pursuing both goals and focus primarily on the Vision Board concept, which has resonated deeply with students. With this, we are setting aside our ideas about course exploration in favor of a more concentrated effort on self-identity and reflection. This doesn’t mean we are abandoning course exploration entirely as our ideas and findings related to it will still be shared with our client for them to run with. However, our immediate focus will be further developing the Vision Board activity to ensure a well-tested design and quality delivery.
Our prototype testing around course exploration did inform this pivot. Visualization again emerged as a key theme, making experiences more meaningful. Students expressed affinity for tools that help them visualize and understand their journey, whether it’s their personal growth or course options. This reinforces our belief in the power of the Vision Board to provide a tangible and engaging way for students to reflect on their identities and aspirations. Additionally, we learned that solutions resonated most when they incorporated and reflected the student point of view. Students wanted personalized experiences that considered their interests and goals. The Vision Board activity allows for this personalization and relevance, making it a powerful tool for helping students feel understood and supported. We also see the exciting potential for the Vision Board to secondarily support the other opportunity spaces we’ve identified, like enhancing connections with community members.
Testing Our Iteration
We iterated upon the original Vision Board by conducting a thorough background research on the benefits of visualizing one’s goals. From there, we sought to measure the impact of our prototype by making the user describe their identity and how they feel before and after completing the activity.
Our data suggests that the prototype has a meaningful impact on the user’s sense of identity. Furthermore, users said it gave them a better sense of direction and helped them reflect on what they actually want to achieve in both short-term and long-term.
We are excited to continue testing how the Vision Board can facilitate conversations between students and teachers and counselors, so students can receive more guidance on how to achieve their goals.
How It Fits
So we’ve covered the what and the why of the Vision Board prototype, now for the how. How does this fit into the whole? For this, we made a bit of a journey map to start.
So now to break this down…
We know that the time we want to target most for this project is just before (and possibly during) the period where students are considering their choices. These may be choices on class selection, or these may be choices regarding future career or life paths. We want students to have a concrete sense of identity, ideally a few concrete goals, and something to talk about with the people in their lives that give them feedback.
Ideally this means that the students are revamping their Vision Boards frequently, whenever they come to a significant conclusion about their lives, or when they decide they want to explore different interests. Realistically, students were telling us in testing that they likely would not take the initiative to actually share a Vision Board or interact with it very often unless given a reason to do so, even if they might benefit from it. The way our design currently is, it is a one-and-done, set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. Not ideal.
This meant a new design challenge: How might we design interactivity in such a way that students are self-motivated to engage with and share the Vision Boards, both their own and those of others? How might we make this engagement consistently fun and productive? This is one of our main challenges as we move further into our final sprint.
Fieldtrip to Config: What We Brought Back
In the last week of June, majority of our team flew out to San Francisco to attend the Config conference. It was an amazing experience filled with great keynotes, inspiring fellow designers, and cool freebies. We learned a lot attending the different talks and mingling with other conference attendees during our days there. Some of the talks that really left an impression were “How to build for, and with, Gen Z” by Jiaona Zhang, CPO of Linktree, and “Product management: half art, half science, all passion” by Dare Obasanjo from Meta.
Not only were there wonderful speakers for visual design, but we also got the opportunity to learn more about the ins and outs of product management and software development. Overall, it was a fun and inspiring trip that allowed us to interact face-to-face with practitioners outside of our Pittsburgh bubble. We went to the big city, the hub of tech, and explored what a lot of our futures might look like in a couple of years. If you ask us if we enjoyed and learned anything from Config, we’d say “yes.” But if you asked us on a deeper level, we might say it was the first time traveling to San Francisco, let alone the West Coast, for some of us. We might say how the trip created this unique opportunity to make friends with designers from all around the world, bond with our fellow MHCI classmates, and try new food from a different city, all while sitting in a self-driving car (thanks to Waymo). And we might talk about how we learned about some cool UX stuff along the way too.
Xoxo,
Team South Fayette
This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
