Connect-U
Thesis Project ( Research + Design)
A platform to guide and connect prospective graduate students
Description
Applying to graduate school is a very important and stressful life decision. One needs to dedicate hours of research to choose a program and understand the requirements needed to start the application. Even then, most times, there is not enough clarity and students often struggle to make informed decisions. The purpose of this project was to research some of the struggles students face during their time applying to graduate school and selecting a major, while prototyping a solution to alleviate some of the challenges associated with the application process.
Connect-U is a web tool that aims at helping aspiring graduate students through increased accessibility to valuable resources, guides, overall application procedure and mentorship and detailed information on majors they might want to pursue for their next degree.
My Role
Primary Research
Expert Interviews
User Interviews
Cultural Probes
Shadowing
Secondary Research
User Journey
Ideation
Prototyping
Every year approximately 2.25 million students apply to Graduate School in the United States of America. According to US News & World Report, a third of those students do it because they are unhappy with their current position or their jobs.
Graduate students have a lot more at stake when they choose to study again.
They leave the blanket of certainty and usually take huge financial loans to get a graduate education.
Every step is a lot more calculated and therefore, requires a lot more support in order to make the right decisions.
There is also added financial, emotional and mental pressure that needs to be addressed
“About 80 percent of students in the United States end up changing their major at least once”
Source: National Center for Education Statistics
The Challenge
During initial discovery through a group discussion with current undergraduate students there was a clear lack of realization of why students were stressed about Graduate School and the application process. When asked about what were driving factors to choosing their current major and education, majority of them leaned on their parents, high school advisors and friends for feedback.
Understanding the Problem
Some Key Insights I gained after the group discussion with the students were:
A lot of students were dependent on their parents and peers about their choice of careers.
Another major takeaway was that about 25% of the students wanted to change their majors (2-3 years after studying for it).
Almost every participant answered that they would change their field of study if they could go back in time.
Interviewing Prospective Graduate Students
At this point of time, I had realized that students need help to alleviate their anxiety and need a channel/ medium to exchange ideas and access to more information. Thus stemming from my own experience and to narrow the scope of my research and focus on a particular audience, I decided to focus on graduate students and their struggles of coping with major change and overall process. I interviewed 5 prospective graduate students.
The first thing all five of them agreed upon was the confusion about the overall process. They had not dealt with writing Statement of Purposes, had no idea about Letters of recommendations and extra documentation necessary for more specific programs. Here are some other things they struggles with too:
No resources other than Google, University websites.
No proper guidance.
Need for peer counselling.
These insights helped me develop a user journey of the user and find points of intervention.
Expert Interviews
As a part of the research, I talked to various experts about what their opinions were about this topic, how could we probably tackle it, what works and what doesn’t.
Academic Counselor: Since I study at a huge academic institution that caters to thousands of students at various levels, all studying different fields, there is one thing that is common throughout all courses, students and academia: counselors. So, I decided to go talk to a few counselors who guided students in various backgrounds. I asked them very similar questions to what I asked the students. Here’s a synthesis of their feedback:
Students have severe self doubt and often anxiety. They need help and support, especially from their peers.
Students need help with program curriculum and outcomes. They can be persuaded to ease their performance anxiety if they have access to course outcome/ preparation needed before they choose that line of study.
2. Graduate Admissions Advisor: In order to recognize some problems students face with the graduate admission process, I went and interviewed a Graduate Admissions Advisor who gave me a lot of insight and most common student queries about the graduate application process.
Students have many unanswered questions that cannot be answered by the school.
Students need more information and help with the overall application process. Since students have so many doubts and questions, resources would help facilitate a much smoother and worry free application.
The User
Based on research and understanding about student problems, the following is the target persona
User Journey
Journey of a Prospective Graduate Student.
After interviewing and organizing the information collected during my primary research, I analyzed the key takeaways from each method and extracted some key points that needed to be addressed:
All of the participants found choosing the right major the toughest part of the initial process because they didn’t know where and how to search for specific majors online. Different universities have different names for the same field of study and most students found this confusing.
Most of them also said that the overall application process was “patchy” and universities provided very little support for prospective students, regarding the documents and how to prepare them. They wished that there was some way for them to find students who would help them through the process and not feel violated at the same time, since most people don’t like unwelcome messages on LinkedIn and Facebook.
All of them said that they wanted more resources to help them with their application, and constantly searching on Google was getting tiresome and was 30 not leading them to the clearest answers. A guide/ list of resources available would be a welcome idea.
Key Insights
Competitive Research
There are a lot of resources that students use to supplement their knowledge and be successful in school, like I mentioned above. In order to create a unique solution, it was important to understand what resources are students currently using and what is working or not working for them. In order to do that I created a heuristic comparison between the different on-line resources currently used by students.
Final Project
Given the landscape of tools available and their shortcomings, Connect-U was born: a platform that facilitates prospective graduate students with useful resources, guides, and mentorship on application procedures. Connect-U aims to become an information and peer support platform that enables prospective graduate students to connect with current graduate students/alumni who can help with their application and can answer more specific questions regarding their major of choice . Connect-U is basically a networking platform specifically catered for graduate students.
This project was built to close the gap of misinformation within students while also providing transparent feedback and mentorship. The hope is that by giving students a platform to honestly share their opinions and experiences, students would get the help they need directly from other students who were once in the same position and understand the challenges of applying to graduate programs.
The name ‘Connect-U’ means ‘connecting you’ to real people, to mentors. Another meaning could be ‘connecting you to University’.
Features
After understanding the pressure points of the user and the journey and compiling all the key takeaways from the primary research, I tried to come up with a viable solution that caters to the problems expressed by the prospective students. Based on my findings, I thought the platform could use the following features:
Mentor Chat
This feature is the one that helps overcome the most important pressure point of the user: their confusion. Talking to someone who can become a mentor will not only facilitate prospective students to gain more knowledge about programs and universities but also have someone to talk to about all their doubts and questions. The peer to peer connection not only helps with the confusion but also lets the aspiring student gain insight about how life could be if they choose that program and gain insight about the type of exposure they would get once they got into graduate school. Thus, choosing the Mentor/Student chat as my niche feature makes my platform have an upper edge from all the other available resources
Resources
One more insight I gained from interviewing prospective students was the lack of resources available at one click. One has to really search deep and extensively on Google about rankings and forums that help with the application process and help connect with students who are in the same process.
How to Guide
The How To Guide will act like a pre-checklist for all the students to start their application for Graduate School. I compiled a 10 easy step guide to apply to 35 graduate school by looking at my graduate application notes from 2017 and confronting this with students currently applying to graduate schools.
Screen Flow
Before sketching out solutions, it was important to understand the user journey and what they would need from this application. In order to do that, I designed a screen flow to closely represent the user journey and give a structure to all the features of this application.
Prototype 1
For the first prototype, I wanted to go a way that I was confident enough and create phone application wireframe screens. It was easy for me to create and test these wireframes for basic functionality. The main reason to start with a mobile application was the ease of access to the device. Everyone uses a smartphone nowadays and the easiest way to connect to someone seemed to be through a mobile application.
The flow of the prototype was:
1. The user signed in/ signed up
2. Then on the search menu, browse the featured majors.
3. Choose a major they would like to know about from the featured list or search their choice.
4. The next screen would then prompt them to see top ranked schools (according to US News Graduate school rankings) of that major under the ‘Universities’ tab.
5. The People tab, of the Search filter, would show the mentors from various universities that have taken the major ‘Computer Science’.
Testing
These screens were tested by 15 students who had recently applied for graduate school. The takeaways were:
Why the need for an App?
Most students use their laptops to apply to graduate schools, thus a website would be a better fit. Also websites are scalable and easier to use and there is no need of downloading an application to access the platform.
Need more sense of direction and understanding
Why is everything divided according to school 4. More resources/chat functionality
Prototype 2
Addressing the feedback from the testing of the first prototype, I decided to pursue the idea of the website and address the other comments by creating more pages and a flow. I started out by building many sketches for the different possible solutions on a whiteboard. I wanted to stay in the lowest fidelity for as long as possible. Try to take out kinks from my designs before moving to higher fidelity.
Testing with Paper Prototype
Because of the stay at home orders that were enacted in New York I was not able to get in-person user testing for the prototype. I relied on sending images via email to multiple people in the NYU community and my friends to test the website. During this time, I found some challenges in connecting with people outside of my circle to get further testing and reactions from users but I plan on doing that in the future. The insights I got back after testing the wireframes were:
Students liked the idea. They thought that the overall flow and functionalities of the platform were promising. They commented on how each feature was relevant and necessary for a newly aspiring student.
Wanted me to add more details and design elements and see the final product. The users wanted to see a completed design with data and functionalities that could be tested and refined. They wanted to provide more feedback based on the content and navigation.
HiFi Prototype
Thus, after the positive response with the paper prototypes. I decided to design the final prototype. Here’s a breakdown of every page and feature of the platform.
Mentor Chat
Reflections and Future Perspectives
The purpose of this project was to find a way to improve the way students apply to graduate school by helping them unpack some of the steps of the process. Through experiments and research, I found that there are struggles that graduate students face and often students don’t get the information they need at the right time. There are external resources but they do not cater to help with specific problems like struggles with the choice of the major or course outcomes.
Also there is no platform that informs the student community and helps them with the process at the peer level.
User Testing and Development
Given the time limitations and because of COVID-19, I did not get to iterate a lot on the user interface and user test it vigorously with students who have already been through the application process to gain more insight and make changes accordingly.
The next step would be to develop this website and make it public for students to use. To get the true extent of this application, it is important to understand how users would use this application organically. Even though usability studies are a good indication for the performance of a product, the real strength comes from numbers.
Once this application is live, we can use data and customer feedback to reiterate the design and make it more useful for the student community.
Outreach and Community
A few ways I could connect to existing communities to let them know about the platform is to circulate it within the numerous graduate student aspirant groups on platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp. This would not only help gain the prospective student users but also mentors who would help these aspiring students. Another way to inform the student community about the platform is to partner with resources that are already available and have high traffic like Yocket and GoGrad.org. These partnerships would be based on mutual respect, publicity and outreach on each other's platforms.
Other potential areas for exploration
Once the current functionalities and features have been iterated on, I would like to extend the reach of the platform to other areas of exploration that I could research and include in the future.
For example another area of opportunity could address the real need for job networking and referrals, and mentorship to prepare for internship and job interviews.