DubsConnect
Connect. Interact. Succeed.
Overview
In our society today, many young students have been forced to be a part of the race called life. They are under immense pressure to prioritize their academics and career over all other aspects of their lives, often sacrificing their mental and physical well-being.
Our website prototype, DubsConnect, aims to reduce the stressors and concerns that many students have regarding finding and applying for internships. By understanding their needs, we hope to ease the burdens that come with the hunt for a career and brighter future.
Project Background
Duration: 9 weeks (January 10, 2022 – March 14, 2022)
Team: 3 members
My Role: UX Designer, UI Designer, User Researcher
Location: University of Washington – Seattle
Users: Students at University of Washington
This project was completed as a part of an undergraduate User-Centered Design course at the University of Washington in Winter of 2022. We selected UW students as our users since it is a user group that we are familiar with and is accessible for in-person interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We proceeded to conduct research, design, prototype, and evaluate with our target users to create our solution, DubsConnect.
Design Process
Ideate - Research - Personas - User Journey Map - Design Requirements - Storyboards Information Architecture - Lo-Fi Prototype - Evaluation Findings - Annotated Wireframe Hi-Fi Prototype - Reflection
Research Findings
After we identified the project theme, we conducted competitive analysis and semi-structured interviews with three target users to understand their needs. We focused on researching, understanding, and summarizing their desires, goals, and pain points with the current online job searching process. By keeping these key takeaways in mind, our hope was to better design our product to satisfy our users’ needs.
Semi-Structured User Interview
We conducted three semi-structured user interviews to ensure consistency between the different interviewers while allowing us to better understand the users' needs by asking follow-up questions when appropriate. We found that students want to:
Find jobs and build their networks
See the job information without jumping to an external website
Have their basic information automatically filled
Connect to someone have experience with their interested jobs/companies
Competitive & Inclusive Design Analysis
Competitive & Inclusive Design Analysis allowed us to look at existing products to understand their strengths and shortcomings. It also gave us the opportunity to find design patterns that are common in existing solutions. We also looked at the inclusiveness of existing solutions to understand how well they serve a range of users.
Personas
Based on our user research, we created two personas as archetypal descriptions of our users. These personas served as human-like references for our team during our ideation, design, and prototyping processes and allowed us to narrow down our solution to address the root problem. We referenced Arjun and Jason’s personas throughout the design process as they encapsulate our understanding of the needs and wants of users.
User Journey Map
A user journey map is essential in unpacking our user’s pain points and determining which factors contribute to their daily mental health, performance in class, and attitude towards their job application process.
We chose to create a user journey map following a school year for Arjun.
The map walks through Arjun’s school year, starting in October when he starts his sophomore year and ending in March when he receives his ideal internship. It includes how he seeks resources and opportunities from career fairs, college advisors, and websites. We tracked Arjun’s feelings and pertinent thoughts that came across his mind throughout the entire process.
Design Requirements
After formulating the persona and journey map of the simulated user, we had a comprehensive understanding of the user's pain points, desires, and goals. Based on this, we listed the main functions of our website and excluded some functions that were not so important or difficult to implement. Design requirements also provided themes for storyboards to display later.
Key Requirements:
Create a profile for user based on personal information, experiences, and skills that they input
Compile a list of internships and research positions that user is qualified for
Enable user to learn about apply for internships directly through the platform without redirecting to external pages
Autofill personal information stored on the platform when applying to different internships
Allow user to customize application information for given company
Connect user with alumni, especially those who have experience in the companies of the user's interest
Lo-Fi Prototype
With our understandings from the information architecture diagram, we used Figma to build the low fidelity prototype. The Lo-Fi prototype focused on the general flow of three specific pathways, key user interactions, and the rough layout of the website. Later, we tested the Lo-Fi prototype with potential users to improve the prototype.
Hi-Fi Prototype
After redesigning and implementing the features, filling in the content, and decorating the pages, we completed the Hi-Fi prototype. The Hi-Fi prototype was the final version of the prototype with both mature functionality and aesthetic quality. For the mock-ups, we selected four pages that are representative of the core functionalities of DubsConnect.
Group Reflection
Looking back at these nine weeks, we went from a group of three strangers to a collaborative and productive group of students working towards a common goal. We learned the steps of user-centered design and practiced it in weekly assignments and in our final project. Overall, it was a great project experience.
If we had more time, we would have liked to build a page that contains the current status of all the jobs that the user has applied for. This feature would allow the user to easily keep track of their progress in one place as well as improve the fluency and user experience of our website. This idea was inspired from another group’s presentation. Additionally, we would like to improve the overall design of the website and implement more fully featured job recommendation functions. Another idea we have is to implement responsive design to our website to work better on devices like phones and tablets with smaller screen sizes.
Our biggest challenge was to differentiate our website from other existing job searching websites. Nowadays, the job searching websites such LinkedIn and Handshake are very comprehensive, but we took advantage of the alumni network in the University of Washington and integrated it into the job searching system. We believed that alumni are easy for users to talk to and build connections with.