Understanding to Make

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.

Initial Paper Prototype

See our initial paper prototype here. We began our process of iterative design with this prototype. Substantially smaller than later iterations, this initial version provided a basis from which we could expand our functionality and design to match user needs.

Testing Process

We conducted four usability tests with our paper prototype, updating and expanding the prototype several times during this process. For a discussion of our process for the first three of these tests, see our Usability Testing Check-In (particularly the “Usability Testing” section). For a discussion of our final test, see our Usability Testing Review (particularly the “Participants” and “Analysis” sections).

Testing Results

We changed our paper prototype at several stages throughout the testing process. To see changes made following a heuristic analysis and design critique of our initial paper prototype, see the “Updates from Heuristic Analysis and Peer Review” section of our Usability Testing Check-In. To see updates made after our first three usability tests, see the “Results from Usability Tests” section of our Usability Testing Check-In. To see the results of our final usability test, see the “Critical Issues” and “Important Revisions” sections of our Usability Testing Review.

Final Paper Prototype

See our final paper prototype in the “Current Paper Prototype” section of our Usability Testing Review. This final iteration on our prototype was the product of the iterative design process documented above and the implementation of our testing results in the form of a paper prototype.

Digital Mockup

See our digital mockup here. Our mockup was largely a translation of our paper prototype into the Balsamiq mockup platform. We incorporated some aesthetic changes to our paper prototype to better model a fully implemented platform in our mockup, and have modified the mockup to match feedback received in class.

Discussion

First and foremost, the iterative design process made us realize that, without user input, we cannot effectively design a platform that serves our users’ needs. By testing our paper prototypes, we were able to see the holes in our assumptions about how to build the College Connect platform and receive useful and pointed feedback from participants about how we could best meet their expectations and desires for the app. Additionally, rapidly adapting our low fidelity prototypes to reflect feedback from our tests allowed us to explore various solutions to problems that were identified during the testing process and converge towards a design that best served our users. Without putting our design through multiple rounds of testing with live users, our platform would simply serve our theoretical understanding of the tasks it was meant to accomplish, not the real needs of the users we hope to serve.

Importantly, the feedback that we received through the usability testing process was different than what we heard from participants in our contextual inquiries. While our contextual inquiries provided us with an understanding of the issues we hoped to solve with College Connect, it was not until we observed a user interacting with our prototype that we began to understand how to design a platform that would accomplish these goals. The significant expansion of our design–both in terms of functionality and number of individual screens–from our initial paper prototype to our digital mockup is reflective of our process of coming to understanding the intricacies of how users will interact with our platform outside of our expectations. While our tasks largely remained the same throughout this process, our understanding of how users will think about accomplishing them, as well as how we can effectively facilitate this with our platform changed substantially.

While we substantially changed our design and understanding of our platform through the iterative testing process, we feel that we could have benefited from additional iterations on our prototypes. Throughout our usability tests, much of the feedback we received suggested additional or extended functionality in our platform. While these revisions were key to fulfilling user requirements, constantly adding to our prototype made it difficult to refine the aspects of our platform that we had already included. We feel that additional rounds of iteration would help us to identify more subtle improvements that could be made to our current design. Additionally, completing the usability testing process with our digital mockup would be a valuable step towards creating a design that could be fully implemented. Observing users interacting with this higher-fidelity prototype would help us to identify any issues that may arise as we work to build this design into a functional platform.

Appendix

Facilitator Script for Usability Testing:

We are designing an app that will help college applicants connect with current college students during the college search process. Today, we will present you with a paper prototype of this app and ask you to complete two tasks with this prototype. To interact with the prototype, simply press any buttons with your finger and write in any text field with a pen. Please do your best to think aloud while you are completing the tasks.

The first task is to find another user who has similar interests to you.

When the user reaches the potential connections page.

Please pretend as if “Interest 1,” “Interest 2,” etc. are the same interests you included in your personal profile.

Upon completion of the first task.

Now that you have found another user with similar interests, please connect with this user and have a conversation with them.

After the participant engaged in a text chat with this user.

Name of user would like to video chat with you. Note that this instruction was included only for the final usability test.

Critical Incidents

Please find a discussion of the critical incidents that arose during our first three usability tests in our Usability Testing Check-In under the “Results from Usability Tests” section and those that arose during our final test in our Usability Testing Review under the “Critical Issues” section.