4 Day Sprint with BrainStation x EY
Re-imagining the first year student experience.
CoastLine is a native iOS app that allows the students of Coastal University to build a digital community, connect with each other, and grow and succeed together.
Overview
TIMELINE: 4 Days (2020)
ROLE: UX/UI Designer
TOOLS: Figma, InVision
CLIENT: BrainStation x EY
TEAM: Taylor Peckham, Henry Mai, Dasom Lee & Chrystina Herminiano
THE PRODUCT
Coastal University is a comprehensive post-secondary institution, offering undergraduate degrees in a broad range of disciplines. Consequently, they maintain a diverse and vibrant student body.
THE PROBLEM
COVID-19-related campus closure has impacted nearly every aspect of the student experience. Being fully online means that the usual student onboarding ceremonies, events, communities, and clubs will need to adapt to an online model or be suspended indefinitely. Impacted the most are first-year students, who are at risk of not feeling immersed in the campus experience or a part of a larger student community, resulting in loneliness, depression, and other mental health issues.
THE REQUEST
How might we help first-year students feel welcomed and part of a community in a 100% online education experience?
The request is to leverage any digital technologies available to completely reimagine a first-year student’s education experience.
DAY One
Our first step was doing secondary research to understand the problem space. My team members and I individually searched the web, news sites, and the app store and gathered our findings and synthesized them into insights and goals. The objective of this exercise was to decipher what the goal is for the entire project, what we were hoping to accomplish, and what impact we wanted to achieve.
We then took any assumptions we had or any problems we might foresee occurring in the future and turned them into questions.
EY Design Studio gave us the option of choosing between three different target users: international students, students with disabilities, and mature students. My team and I decided on mature students as that was a group of people whom we had the most access to and promptly began to do some primary research to further understand our target users and their pain points. Once we had formulated a list of questions as a group, we interviewed 3 participants who fit our criteria (25 years and older who are currently in school or going back to school) and we gathered the following insights.
This led us to brainstorm over 30 “How Might We?” questions and after thorough discussions, we were able to narrow down our choices to one that we felt best encompassed our project goal and the insights we gained from our interviews.
How might we offer mature students a platform to seek peer to peer support in order to foster academic success within their cohort?
DAY Two
Day Two began with us taking a deep dive into apps, platforms, products, and solutions that are trying to solve a similar problem. We wanted to do some competitor research to see what was out there and how we could incorporate components and features that had potential into our design. We looked multiple products like Slack, Edmodo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Basecamp and voted on the feature we wanted to focus on. It was an unanimous vote for forums.
Next up was concept sketches. Due to time constraints, we decided that incorporating crazy 8s into our ideation process would be the best use of our time. Therefore, we took 10 mins and we all individually sketched out all the possible ways we could incorporate our forum feature, as well as any other ideas we thought would be beneficial.
After doing concept sketches and sharing our ideas, we decided that in order to supply mature students with both academic resources and peer-to-peer support, a pod feature would also be beneficial along with the forum feature we had already decided on.
DAY Three
Since the previous day we had already decided what features we wanted to incorporate into our design, myself and two other team members began to create the mid-fidelity prototype.
We then proceeded to do some usability testing on 3 users where we were given the following feedback which we took into account when designing our hi-fidelity prototypes.
CoastLine - Our Solution
A digital platform that provides mature students with the resources they need to succeed in their education - together.
Students can log in with their school IDs, select the courses they are taking, and begin connecting with other students in their classes or ones with similar interests. Then they are share resources, network, and grow together.
DAY Four
Our final day of the sprint was here. This was the day where we would finally be sharing everything we had produced in the last three days with stakeholders from EY. They consisted of the Executive Creative Director, the Executive Strategy Director, and the Manager of Business Transformation.
We were given five minutes in which we introduced our solution, initial research, insight from interviews, our persona - Phillip, features, usability testing, the value it provides the client - Coastal University, and the next steps we would take to make the app experience even better.
It was an incredible experience! I had an amazing time both presenting and witnessing what the other groups had come up with.
To sweeten the experience even more, a few weeks later the winners of the EY x BrainStation sprint were announced and our team had come out on top!
I was extremely proud of myself and my team for all our effort and determination.
This was only my second sprint but will definitely be a memorable one.
Takeaways
Learn each other’s strengths. Having discussed what everyone felt most comfortable doing - whether that be research, design, writing - prior to starting the project was extremely valuable as it allowed for smooth sailing throughout the course of the sprint. It also created trust between us as teammates and helped delegate who would do what.
User comes first! There is no spine to your design if it is not bringing value to the user. We tried to adhere to this even though there were many times that we were forced to take a step back and re-evaluate the necessity of certain features.
Become comfortable critiquing and being criticized. It is hard for me to say negative things when I am asked to give my opinion on an idea or design but I realized that sometimes it’s vital to just share your feelings, especially in a space where the result impacts more than one person. On the other hand, if someone doesn't like your design - it’s ok! Learn from each other’s comments and experiences.