Helping bridge the gap between interest and resources in design at UC Berkeley

Role:

Lead UX Designer

TIme:

8 weeks (Spring 2017)

Responsibilities:

UX design + research, ideation, high-fidelity wire-framing, prototyping, user testing,
business models, market research, storyboarding

Deliverables:

High-fidelity Figma mock ups, wireframes, design spec

Tools used:

Figma, Sketch, Invison

Techniques used:

User Experience, Visual, & Interaction design, User Experience Research

Problem

How might we reach out to Berkeley Students who are unaware of the field of design but interested?

Goals

The primary goal of this project was to empower students interested in design by providing guidance and resources.

- Illustrating different stages students will go through as a designer
- Connecting them with relevant existing resources like courses
and employment communities

UX Research

Need Finding

In order to narrow down the "how might we" question, we started the project by interviewing people and tried to find out how they feel about the resources Berkeley has for design. Since we are a group of college students at UC Berkeley, our target audience was also college students at UC Berkeley as they are the most accessible. We created an interview guide that include general questions about design, such as:

1. What about Design interests you?
2. How much experience do you feel you have with the field of Design?
3. In your own words how would you define Design?
4. How do you feel about Berkeley's approach to immersive Design education?
5. What are some methods you feel students can become more aware about Design?

Research Synthesis from 10 Interviews

College students generally felt that:
1) "Berkeley did not have enough resources to connect students with design"
2)"There is not enough publishing or notifications to alert students of available design resources on campus"
3) "Being able to immerse oneself in design is hard because clubs are competitive"
4) "I just want to learn more about design and figure out what part of the scale I am at"
5) "I want to learn about the different fields of design and connections"

We traced several problems, identifying several factors:
- Berkeley needed to create a more immersive design approach
- Students wanted to learn about the field of design and what stage they are at
- Students wanted access to resources depending on the stage and field of design interest they had

​Thus, the new "How Might We" question became:
"How might we make updated design resources more accessible to students at Berkeley/create a platform for UC Berkeley designers to grow, enabling them with a sense of belonging and identity?"

Market research

We conducted market research to see what are the existing products that people use to solve our narrowed-down problem, and we found:

Physical Products

Flyers
- Information Sessions
- Design Clubs
- Sketch books
- Digital Products

Design websites
- Design club website links
- Jacobs Institute for Design resource page
- Design Decal applications
- Primary User Research goal: To identify the issues related to creating an access guide to design resources based on level and interest, through a comprehensive app.

In order to generate more insights, we conducted even more interviews with college students -- this time with more specific questions:

From another 8 interviews with Berkeley students who experience a lack in design resources and accessibility on campus, we learned:

- 5 out of 8 mentioned "non-competitive information"
- 4 out of 8 mentioned "keeping up to date"
- 3 out of 8 mentioned "being connected to events"
- 6 out of 8 stated "understanding what level of design I am at and the resources available to me"

Thus we gained insight that: students struggle with finding a comprehensive access to design resources at the UC Berkeley campus and need a solution to detect where they are on the design spectrum of experience as well as connect them to real time events. The existing technologies and physical products fail to solve the problem of varied design background and individualized guidance to resources and updates.

Divergence/Storyboarding

From our user interviews, we made a story about the access to design problem of a typical UC Berkeley Student as well as mapped out all the potential resources that students should have in relation to design.

Design Opportunities

1) Tabeling: Creating a table on Sproul Plaza that showcases all of the possible approaches to design that a student could become involved in and we contemplated creating an interactive step display so that they could identify the spectrum of design they most identify with.

2) An App: that helps students struggling with finding a comprehensive access to design resources at the UC Berkeley campus and need a solution to detect where they are on the design spectrum of experience as well as connect them to real time events, notifications (via phone alerts & or emails) and career/ advancement opportunities.

You can customize your "design level" through selecting a position on the scale, and improve this threshold by tapping on the phone when you found the area of design you most identify with to receive notifications of all design-related events and specialize search features, such as through the fields of design:

- human centered design -engineering design
- digital product design
- environmental design
- visual design
- physical product design
- design in animation and computer design
- game design

We decided to work on Option 2, which is the app because it is feasible, targets a much larger audience, especially the students who are not on Sproul to access our booth, and is more effective with regard to real time notifications and alerts both through phone notifications via the app as well as email notifications.

Low fidelity Sketches

Mental Model of Design Process Steps

Mid-High Fidelity Mockups

Reflection

The user flow is seen as the user will first choose an element of design they identify with or the open explore option which will guide them to the second screen within the app where they can see all current design events happening for the current week to the right and have the option to filter lurches based on design categories, resources, and experience levels as well as save posts and sync them to google calendars. The user can customize their profile icon as seen to the top right and can opt in to receive real time notification alerts.

​I chose to stick to a basic color scheme with opposing primary colors as the focal point as to not distract from the overall information gathering.

What would I do differently?

I would seek to implement a system on the app which links classes that Berkeley offers related to design, as well as links to the Certificate in UI/UX Design, and Human Centered Design. Another addition that would make this platform, aid students better with regards to networking and developing connections, is that there could be a toggle list of Professors in design, and their active Berkeley email ID's for contact. A social iterative improvement would be to integrate a system similar to Facebook events where as a student you can see who all will be attending a design event and form connections.

Thank you for visiting! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out :)