Inside.NYU
Project Vision
The transition from high school to college is hard enough. Get thrown in a big city like New York, with no campus and thousands of students, and the adjustment becomes even tougher. Inside.NYU is a mobile app experience that helps welcome a new incoming class to campus.
Duration
March 1, 2021-March 8, 2021
Role
UX/UI Designer
I conducted user research and designed the end-to-end mobile app experience.
Tools
Gathering Data
Being a NYU freshman myself a few years ago, I was aware of the challenges that incoming students face in the vibrant, but also frightening, city of New York. To understand the problem and why it matters, I conducted quantitative and qualitative research. I discovered actual statistics to back up the problem.
The New York Times Stats
1/3 of college students
drop out or transfer by the end of Freshman Year and report an unsuccessful transition to college campus life
Over 1/2
of NYU students expressed interest in receiving information about how to help others in distress
"There is a positive association between relationship quality and adjustment among first-year college students who are in their emerging adulthood years."
"Students who are strongly socially connected and socially engaged are more likely to remain in school and report satisfaction with their university."
New York University Statistics
Understanding College Connections
Besides gathering data to back up my design decisions, I reached out to actual students and conducted user research interviews to gain real insights into the problem.
Objectives
Understand and Identify:
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How new students and current students currently connect
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Common campus life questions that new students have
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Ideal settings students look for when asking and giving advice
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Potential areas of opportunity
Research Methodology
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Part 1: Unmoderated usability study where I observed a pair of students (one current and one incoming) interact and ask each other questions
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Part 2: Moderated usability study where I performed card-sorting exercises with participants and asked them to group common campus life questions
Participants
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Current and incoming NYU undergraduate students
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Residing in on-campus or off-campus housing
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Between ages of 18-26
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Fairly equal genders
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Various ethnicities
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From at least 5 different majors/areas of study
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Include at least 4 participants with disabilities
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1 user with assistive technologies
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1 user with visual impairment
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1 user with auditory impairment
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1 user who speaks English as a second language non-native speakers)
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Meet The NYU Students
1.
Current NYU Student
2.
Incoming NYU Student
"Ah-ha" Moments!
"Without my connections to upperclassmen, I would have transferred schools or taken a gap year. I wish we had more opportunities to meet older students. "
-Sophia F. (Current Student)
Value honest answers and advice
Current students didn't receive the advice and support they needed
Prefer student-regulated rather than staff-regulated advice & information
Interactions with the NYU administration have been poor
Building connections is essential when asking for advice
Clubs are the most important part of campus life
So, What Is The Problem?
Adjusting to NYU campus life is hard for new students! For a variety of reasons…
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New surroundings (New York City!)
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Limited or lack of support
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Feelings of loneliness, stress, and anxiety
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Isolated from a community
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Uninformed of campus resources
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Increased personal freedom and responsibility
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Lots and lots of unanswered questions!
Areas of Opportunity
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Current students are the best resource for getting advice and asking questions
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Face-to-face interactions between students are extremely valuable and should be developed
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Creating connections between current and incoming NYU students needs to be improved
Insights to Action
I formulated the following How Might We question that guided me as I designed potential solutions.
How might we create an experience that allows incoming NYU students to feel informed and also connected to current NYU students as they adjust to NYU campus life?
Brainstorm of potential solutions that would solve user pain points and prioritize face-to-face interactions between new and incoming students.
No Administration Involved – Students Only!
It was clear to users that getting involved with the NYU administration was unhelpful and that students preferred to receive feedback from their peers. They felt that other students and upperclassmen were often more honest and open with their advice compared to the school’s administration. To resolve this issue, the app only involves current and incoming NYU students, instead of higher ups.
Campus Life Forum Groups
Many incoming students felt uninformed of campus resources and had lots of unanswered questions in various categories. During the user research interviews and card-sorting exercises, I had incoming students group their questions about NYU into various categories. I also had them rank each category in order of importance. I used that information to establish the key campus life forum groups that each student could join upon downloading the app.
The main forum groups included:
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Housing/Residential Life
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Clubs/Student Organizations
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Academics
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Health & Wellness
A user can select which groups they want to join and can view posts with questions and answers from others in their community. This grouping created a solution for individuals who weren’t comfortable asking questions themselves and who wanted to feel part of a larger community forum group.
Live Video Chat Responses
While feeling part of the community was essential, individual interaction was even more of a priority for students. Users revealed the value of 1:1 connections and face-to-face interactions, which inspired my live video chat response feature. This feature allows incoming NYU students to ask a question by recording a video of themselves. A current NYU student will receive the question (in the recorded video format) and can respond back to them in a video format as well. This video exchange is a more personal version of the forum groups. It spices up the text-based Q&A by fostering a deeper 1:1 connection that involves faces!
Diving Into Designs
Prior to diving into the designs, I began by crafting a user scenario flow chart. This allowed me to distinguish the two different paths that would occur depending on whether a user was an incoming student or a current student.
Testing With Students
I began testing my low fidelity prototype with users to understand how they were interacting with the prototype and how I could improve the product over a few more iterations. I asked users the following questions:
"How would you describe this product using your own words?"
"What was the most intuitive part of this app? What was the least?"
"What features do you find most valuable and why?"
"What is the first thing you see yourself doing with this app?"
"What features would make this app more useful and why?"
"How would you describe your overall experience with this product?"
User Feedback
Through the next round of usability testing sessions, I gained extremely valuable feedback and new insights that I could incorporate into future versions of the app:
"Love the different forum groups!"
"A cool feature would be ensuring a way to get timely responses"
"It would be nice to have the option to send questions and responses in a text format as well"
"Being able to accept and deny questions is helpful"
Inside.NYU
Get the “inside scoop.” Inside.NYU is a mobile app experience that helps welcome a new incoming class to campus. The product allows incoming NYU students to ask questions and receive responses from current NYU students with their advice in forum groups. Students can respond with live videos to create more direct and human responses.
Addressing Privacy & Ability
While I wanted to incorporate every new feature suggested, within the timeline of this project, I had to prioritize the feedback and focus on what was most important. The most pressing concern for users, especially those with disabilities, was feeling discomfort and an inability to film video responses.
To address this issue, I created a new option that allowed students to ask 1:1 personal questions in text format. This offered a second option to users who preferred to communicate through text instead of video.
Results & Solution Benefits
More Intimate Connections:
85% of participants agreed that face-to-face, vlog-style video responses would help build deeper and more intimate connections with other students.
Sense of Community:
Current students and new students can get closer to creating a community at a school known to have "no campus."
NYU Resources Put to Use:
Students would become informed about all the support services and resources (counseling, academic advisors, and more) that NYU has to offer.
Seamless Transition to College:
New students would feel supported and safe in their transition to college.
Success Metrics
To measure the success of the inside.NYU mobile app experience over time, I would evaluate the following:
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Has there been an impact?
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Number of questions posted by incoming students
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Number of questions answered by current students
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Ratio of questions asked to questions answered
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Number of student connections made
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Long Term --> How well do new students transition to campus life?
If I Had More Time...
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Ensure product is accessible & usable to all (students with visual, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities)
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Design for communication and language barriers
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Consider VR/AR capabilities to have incoming students immersed in their new campus
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Conduct a few more rounds of user-testing sessions with more diverse groups of students
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Refine & iterate some more!
What I Learned & Key Takeaways
1. Disrupting established systems is hard: Changing and solving problems in established systems such as schools is challenging. This doesn't mean that there aren’t potential solutions that can help users. There are unique ways to get around a problem!
2. Design challenge constraints: With design challenges, there isn’t endless time to add all of the desired features in a project. Conducting user interviews helps you understand which ones are the most important to focus on within the constraints of your project budget and timeline.
3. Card-sorting is cool!: Card-sorting is a great way to get your users involved in the process. As designers, we often think that our solution is the best one, but that isn’t always true! Our users are experiencing the problem themselves and often have unique insights and wonderful ideas for how to solve it. This is why it is so essential to get users involved in the design process along with you!
Designing an app that improves the transition experience for incoming students was an empowering project to work on! Entering college is thrilling , but also overwhelming and intimidating! A strong community and network of students are the ones who can guide us through those exciting, but challenging times. I enjoyed working on a project that could help create a stronger sense of community and foster connections at my school.