Design Thinking in Action
In order to practice my own design thinking skills, I completed a study into current problems at Quinnipiac and how something that directly affects students could be fixed.
For this, I wanted to interview a fellow student and hear about their perspective, what issues came up for them throughout their time here, and how design thinking could be used to potentially fix them.
Empathize
I started by interviewing my classmate Christelle, and seeing how her experience at Quinnipiac has been thus far, and what problems she has encountered.
One of the main aspects that came up was her struggles with Quinnipiac’s Self-Service portal, and how stressful it was anytime she needed to register for classes throughout the year.
I set this as my target, being the main aspect I wanted to fix, as not only was this a problem that I have encountered throughout my time at Quinnipiac, but it is something that every student goes through.
With this first stage of the process down, I could now move on to defining my problem and how I wanted to solve it.
Define
I next can look over all the information I collected and determine what my problem statement will be. I found so far that one of Christelle’s main problems with the Self-Service portal was the registering system students go through, and how stressful the experience is.
Beyond that is how little information is provided to the student on the plan and schedule page, where students actually register. It in reality just lets you look at what you added, a bit more information in a pop-up that takes a surprising amount of time to load, and a search bar to find a new class.
From there I knew that one of the main problems came from just the lack of information this page provides the user.
This lead me to set my problem statement as “Course Registration is a challenge for Christelle because crucial information is hidden and unintuitive to find” and make my How We Might statement “How Might We make necessary information more visible and easier to find for students trying to register for classes.”
Ideate
Once I had these aspects nailed down, I needed to start creating ideas for what could help fix this problem with Self-Service.
I did some quick sketches for ideas that could possibly help, then took the ones I liked to make more concrete concepts.
From there I made three possible concepts that I believed could help make Quinnipiac’s self-service a bit better. They consisted of a course planning sidebar, a My Progress drop-down, adding advisor recommendations, and more!
After this, I met back up with Christelle to see which idea she liked the most. She found that the first one had the most potential, being both a useful addition that could bring more info to the plan and schedule page while also making it simpler as well.
Prototype
Before making a solid prototype, I needed to go back to the drawing board and add some more info to this initial concept.
While I did like this one a lot, it was missing a ton of info that is normally provided to students and was missing some aspects that would add a more dynamic feel to the page. This included adding some color coding to the kinds of classes you registered for, an add button for when adding new classes to your plan, and more.
After adding all the changes I ended up with my final prototype.
Test
Lastly, with the prototype finished, I went back to Christelle to get her thoughts on it, and luckily, she really liked it.
She liked how much easier it was to find what you were looking for, with a simple place where all the class information would show up, as well as potential places for things like My Progress.
She also liked the idea of adding a color coding for the different types of classes you enroll for, i.e. a different color for UC classes, versus major and minor courses.
Lastly, she talked about how the design just needs a bit more clarification about the colors and possibly more info about the classes you add to your plan.
This was a really fun project to get to work on, as not only did I get to see and hear about problems that students at Quinnipiac have, but I got to redesign a site that I’ve always wanted to try and redo for a while now.
I hope to use this project to make a final version of this using Figma so that Quinnipiac can actually use the information for a redesign.
I’ve linked the full project below to scroll through for anyone interested!