Looking to Understand

College Connect

Our Team

We chose not to assign specific group roles to our members because of the dynamic nature of our project and the varied tasks required to complete it. Instead, we divided work for each task based on our group member’s particular skills and availability.

Problem and Solution Overview

College Connect was inspired by a simple observation: learning about colleges is hard. For many applicants, commonly available resources, such as college admissions offices and campus tours, do not provide the type of in-depth information about campus culture and activities that are often most helpful when searching for and selecting a college. Through College Connect, an app connecting college applicants to students at the schools they are interested in, we hope to make this information available to everyone on a comfortable and reliable platform. Our app allows applicants to share personal information and interests, and suggests students at their prospective colleges who share these interests. We hope to facilitate personal conversations between users to help spread genuine and useful information for the college search process. Read our project proposal to learn more.

Design Research

Our research consisted of three contextual inquiries with individuals representing various stakeholders in our project: a current college student speaking with younger relatives about the college search process and his experiences at Williams, a high school junior currently in the process of searching for a college, and a Williams College admissions officer presenting at an information session. To learn more about why we chose these participants and the stakeholders in this project, see our Contextual Inquiry Plan. For an in-depth analysis of these inquiries and our analysis of them, see our Contextual Inquiry Review. We additionally have a thorough analysis of our inquiry with Vinny, the current college student we observed, here.

Task Analysis Questions

From our contextual inquiries and subsequent work on the College Connect platform, we developed a nuanced understanding of the tasks our users hope to complete with our platform. Our analysis of these tasks guided our design choices throughout the project, and continue to shape how we think about developing College Connect. A full response to the task analysis questions posed in this project can be found in the “Task Analysis” section of our Contextual Inquiry Review.

Proposed Designs

We considered several designs for the College Connect platform. These designs explored the merits of implementing our platform on both mobile and desktop devices, as well as the value of centering different tasks and platform features in our design. Read more about these designs and their motivations here.

Written Scenarios

Scenarios for each of our proposed user tasks can be found here. These scenarios frame our tasks in terms of the user’s interaction with our platform, and expose the core requirements that College Connect must fulfill to server our users.

Storyboards for Selected Design

We ultimately selected a mobile, connection-based design which emphasizes the personal connections and conversations that users can have on our platform. Further, we chose to develop this design in consideration of two key tasks: find other users with similar interests to you and speak candidly without fear of repercussion from colleges. We believe that these tasks are central to our goal to provide useful and unique information to our users about the college search process. A full analysis of why we chose this design and storyboards for these two tasks can be found here.