Contextual Inquiry Review

In our contextual inquiry process, we had the opportunity to learn about three of our key stakeholders–college applicants, college students, and admissions officers. Each of these user segments will use College Connect in fundamentally different ways and to accomplish differing tasks. However, across our inquiries, we observed three key common user requirements: 1) a comfortable and casual environment for conversations 2) a trustworthy source of information that is not biased by interest in the college and 3) a shared interest from all users in our platform being a useful and robust source for college information.

Participants

We conducted three contextual inquiries with the key stakeholders in the college search process. First, we observed a conversation between Vinny, a senior at Williams, and his cousin who is currently applying to Williams. This inquiry importantly reminded us to pay attention to our college-aged users and ensure that we are serving the needs of this user segment. Additionally, observing Vinny’s conversation with his younger cousin made evident the importance of creating a platform that encourages casual and honest discourse between users.

These user needs were further emphasized while observing Sam, a high school senior and potential lacrosse recruit from Vermont, at an admissions office information session. During the session, Sam primarily expressed interest in the school’s academics and resources. However, when we discussed his college search process, Sam expressed that he valued information from other students more highly than from school administrators. He said that, especially when speaking with potential teammates, he was able to get the “real feel” for the school and campus life. He seemed particularly concerned with interpersonal relationships on campus, and relied on students he met to learn about how people in particular social groups interact and what they are involved in on campus.

Another perspective came from Alice, an admission counselor at Williams. We observed an information session directed by her, and communicated with her via a semi-structured interview. During the session, Alice primarily described the college’s specialties and what the admissions look for in prospective students. For specialties, Alice highlighted the fact that Williams has quite strong academics, and creates an intimate learning environment with its responsive faculty and small class sizes. She said that admissions generally look for what makes an individual unique. She urged students to express their interests by writing about them in the application essays. She also encouraged students who are into arts to submit an arts portfolio. During the interview, Alice mentioned that while the admissions gave an outline of the college’s statistics, perspective students should communicate with current students about aspects such as student life and more detailed classroom experience. Alice also noted that prospective students can connect with current Williams students using Ask an Eph.

Themes and Process

Our inquiries produced serveral key themes about user needs and design requirements. We identified these themes through a progressive process of affinity diagramming. We first created a diagram using notes taken from our inquiry with Vinny. As we completed our other inquiries, we compared the notes taken from them to this initial diagram, restructuring the diagram and its groupings as we added notes and ideas from successive inquiries. While each of these inquiries addressed a different user segment, the diagramming process yeilded significant overlap in their needs and the process of grouping these notes demonstrated three key requirements for our design.

Our initial affinity diagram for our contextual inquiry of Vinny.

First, users want a comfortable and casual environment in which they can discuss their interests and concerns. To make this an effective and distinguished source of information for the college search process, we have to ensure that all users feel comfortable providing and asking for authentic representations of campus life. Importantly, we need to emphasize through our design, that this is not a tool for admissions offices to assess candidates, but rather for applicants to learn about colleges from their students.

Second, this needs to be a trustworthy source. For any stakeholder group–applicants, students, and admissions officials–to use this platform, it needs to provide trustworthy and honest information. The current students who join need to be willing to share genuine information with applicants about their experiences, and applicants need to be willing to speak frankly about their own lives for the interactions to be useful. Further, for admissions offices to embrace our platform, we will need to maintain a reputation as a source of valuable and truthful information for applicants–if we are simply steering applicants away from schools or supplying the same information as the admissions offices can, College Connect is not doing its job.

We note in particular that there is a theme of “shared interest”. On the prospective student’s side, this means that the college should be able to host that interest for the student, and that a portion of the current students should share that interest. For example, for Sam, this translates into the college having a great lacrosse team, and that there are current students who are also interested in lacrosse that he can talk to. Moreover, this shared interest helps prospective and current students establish a relationship easier, so that important college information can be exchanged faster. For college admissions, the prospective student demonstrating great interest in an activity that the college is interested in shows the student’s dedication, and helps the student get admitted. All of these factors will help each other. For example, suppose A is interested in playing football, and connects with a large group of students at school S who are talented football players. Then there is a high probability that school S values football players greatly, so communicating with current students will both help A get into a matching school and help S find the students it is looking for.

Task Analysis

Our project’s target audiences are prospective and current college students. Currently, prospective college students usually either go to someone they know for university recommendations or attend information sessions such as campus tours or visit university websites for general information on the school. Although not bad approaches to learning about schools, the information prospective students get are often tailored to portray the school in a positive light through fun facts and typical data. Holistic perspectives are often ignored. Prospective students are not given the opportunity to speak with current college students who share similar interests or ask about certain topics not shown on pamphlets. We believe prospective students should be able to know as much about the school as possible before applying or accepting an offer. Thus, through our desired tasks, prospective students will be more confident in their understanding of the daily life at a university and which schools they would like to attend. Our product will allow a user to create a personalized account/profile containing their interests - possible major(s), sports, clubs, extracurricular activities - communication between high school and current students through messaging and video chats, a ranking of colleges so students can easily decide where to accept once given offers, and general writing on forums.

Although the steps to completing a task should be intuitive, we will provide an FAQ section explaining how the tasks are done. To make this product as accessible as possible, users will be able to access the website on a phone or computer allowing them to complete tasks anywhere. As a result of user profiles and communication through personal messaging and/or forums, we will need to store this information so users can go back and look at what has been said. Students will generally perform tasks every day so as to stay updated or make changes to their profiles. Thus tasks need to be completed and shown on profiles instantly, especially with message communication. Possible issues are miscommunication or pages timing out, but those are not worrisome concerns.