Case Study
Role
UX Designer
Team members
Vania Liu, Tyler Gates
Timeline
Nov 2023 - 1.5 day sprint
Tools
Figma
Methods and Approach
User Research, Affinity Mapping, Persona Development, Wireframing, Prototyping, Hi-Fi Mockups
General Assembly (GA) is an organization that offers tech bootcamps to help people transition into new careers. Because these bootcamps are fully remote, it has been a challenge for GA students to build relationships with each other that go beyond the digital classroom.
In this 1.5-day sprint, a fellow UX designer and I teamed up with a group of GA developer students to create a solution that improves the GA student experience by enhancing students' sense of community.
Autonomy in communication
To understand how students currently engage with each other and what can be improved, I performed user interviews with 6 groups of 2-3 developer students. Synthesizing their responses revealed that students wanted to be able to choose how to engage in communication that best suited their needs, such as building a professional network, while staying within their own comfort zones. The following are needs that came up repeatedly throughout the interviews.
Reaching beyond your own cohort
Currently, students are only encouraged to communicate with other students in their cohort. Students wanted an way to find and connect with others outside their classrooms. This could mean cross-course communication, such as UX students connecting with software engineering students, or communication with GA alumni. Opening this channel of communication allows students to better leverage their status as a GA student to gain career advice and opportunities.
Low stakes
GA has a short list of official slack channels that students can choose to join. When asked for their thoughts on these channels, students repeatedly voiced that they have a heightened anxiety about sending a casual message into an official space, regardless of how many people were in that channel. Students stated that they would prefer a low-stakes and low-pressure way of connecting with others.
Better organization
There are non-official Slack channels that have been made by previous students, but students voiced that they wouldn't consider joining them. Not only was this pool of channels difficult to find, but there was also no way to filter them or see what they were about.
The need for better organization also appeared above the student level. For research purposes, we reached out to the GA officials running our hackathon for a comprehensive list. We ended up being sent through a handful of officials to find someone who had a list, and the list only had the official GA channels.
Using this research, we created a persona named Dev.
Dev (they/them)
Dev is a full time student at General Assembly who often finds it tough to build authentic community in a fully remote cohort. They acknowledge that Slack is a great tool for in-class communication, but his limiting when trying to connecting with people outside of their cohort/class time. They thrive on peer support, but finds it difficult to weed through the volume of channels on Slack in search of communities that apply to them.
Dev needs an easier way to access a broader network of peers in order to get the support and connections they need as they navigate their way into the professional world.
Dev's User Flow
If it ain't broke…
Taking the time constraint of this sprint into account, our team decided to built upon and improve what already existed instead of starting from scratch. Our proposed solution was to create an additional tab in GA’s student portal that led them to a filterable list of existing GA communities. From that page, students would be able to easily find a community that is right for them and foster meaningful connections.
I then quickly created lo-fi wireframes to show our developer counterparts a visual representation of our design solution. We made sure that everything we wanted to do was codable within the time limits of the hackathon before we committed to it and brought it to hi-fi.
Our team won the hackathon. As exciting as that was, I am also grateful to have learned so much from experience. Though our developers had many great ideas, our user interviews really showed me the importance of gathering data from multiple perspectives to find a solution that is truly useful to multitudes. The importance of prioritization and effective communication was also highlighted during the hackathon, and both are things that I continue to value while creating design solutions.
Related work
