Internship – 10 Weeks
UX, XR, Consulting
Planning &
Administration
Design Research
Visual Design
10 Weeks
Figma
UserBit
Notion
Miro
Instead of perfecting the persona cards, I decided to devote my time crafting the process over the product. Since it was designed to be a legacy project, I knew that within one quarter, I wouldn’t be able to create a comprehensive deck of the entire student body. However, I could create a process that could later be replicated, expanded, and improved upon.
When research began, I quickly noticed the limitations of being a one-person research team. I wanted to be fully transparent to the stakeholders when I presented the deliverables.
Students are dynamic creatures, always meta-forming into something new every second. This made it important to frequently evaluate and revise the personas to ensure it’s still relevant to the daily experiences of the students.
While it’s a top priority to be objective in research, biases will always exist. I’ve tried to reduce the biases in this project by getting feedback from stakeholders, but the best way is to use multiple sources of feedback to validate any hypothesis.
Personas can be a great tool for understanding students. But it is even better at highlighting the things that you don’t yet know about them. In that case, I made the tool a guide on how and who to reach out to.
+300
3
12
I reached out to the stakeholders on campus that work closely with students and we began brainstorming various personas. This quick exercise helped me narrowed down target personas whom I got to interview and gave me a roadmap for the future of this project.
To design the cards, I made modular components on Figma so that it’s accessible and customizable for any future teams.
The names of the personas are actual names from the school and they are prefaced with an alliterative descriptor (e.g. Exemplary Esra) so that they could be quickly referenced without memory recall. Some of the pictures of students were also submitted by the interviewees themselves, but the names and the stories were mismatched to protect their identities.
These cards were not a part of the original plan but were added later on because I found patterns of events emerging from the stories that the students told. Event cards hold thought-provoking questions that ask, “What if…” and “How might we…” to riddles the policy and program creators to make meaningful experiences for their users.
The idea of Human-Centered Design is still nascent in higher ed. Activity cards are meant to teach stakeholders how to use the cards to spark new, and engaging ways to bring students back into their creative process. These exercises can run in meetings or workshops to help develop an understanding of the students, as well as brainstorming new strategies policies and programs
– Arnie Lund, Professor of Practice at UW Bothell
This project started with a small inspiration, fueled by supporters on campus, and realized through its limitations. Working alone– not in a team, made me appreciate how much more you can achieve when you are together. That’s why one of the successes of this project is that it lives beyond myself. Through the open-source library of designs and processes, this project will continue on and continue to grow. And in the future, I see it being even more impactful by combining both qualitative and quantitative insights.
Special thanks to Arnie Lund (Advisor), Gowri Shankur (Sponsor), and Andrea Neubert (Supervisor)
This project is set to be created into a student assistant position in the Planning and Administration org. In addition, Dr. Arnie Lund who was an advisor for this project is incorporating into the class he’s teaching: CSS 478 Usability and User-Centered Design in the Fall of 2020. Stay tuned for future updates.