IMajor
Current or prospective college student have to make many important academic decisions. The biggest of all is deciding on a major. Yet my team and I came to the realization that despite all students having to make this decision, many students encounter difficulties. We wanted to help students and thus IMajor was born.
The goal of this project was to create an effective solution to combat the uncertainty when deciding a college major and decrease the amount of potential internal transfers for UT students.
The project was designed so that each team member would be in charge of designing a feature of the app. I was in charge of the profile feature. This project was also intended to finish after the high fidelity prototype was created.
Description
UX/UI Designer
Team Leader
Researcher
Role
Yesenia Garcia
Justice Bustos
Collin Wolfhope
Nick Athanason
Team
By conducting background research about the problem, we identified several key insights:
Many people feel the process of choosing a major is overwhelming and complicated
Making an unsure or uninformed decision can increase the time and cost needed to finish a degree.
Deciding on a college major can feel binding when it comes to a students time, money, and especially future
Background Research
We researched existing sources people use to inform their decision and found that there wasn't one comprehensive source currently available. Each of the services and sources we examined had major weaknesses or only provided insight into one area of consideration.
Identified competitors and what they offer:
Handshake - Strengths/preferences match majors & careers
Command Education - Research what schools have to offer
LinkedIn - Allows observation of career paths
Reddit - Crowdsource for specific questions
Family & Friends - Convenient for many users
Ellucian - Grouped Majors
UT Department Websites - Descriptions of department and specific majors
Indeed - Discover different jobs
Academic Advisors - Have major-specific info
Competitive Analysis
After interviewing users about their experience with selecting their major, we created an affinity map to cumulate our findings and identify overarching themes.
Gathering Insights
Our next step was to create personas to help us better understand the different types of users and their needs.
Personas
We created a stakeholder map to identify who we will need to collaborate with through the design and implementation process.
Stakeholder Map
We utilized the insights from our research to develop the features and design of our app. The next phase was to each create rough sketches of different features.
Ideation Sketches
The paper prototypes were further refined and led to the low fidelity prototypes. Due to the time constraint of the project, each team member was assigned a feature that they would develop the layout and design for.
Low Fidelity Prototypes
We conducted usability testing on the low fidelity prototypes utilizing a think-aloud protocol were participants where asked to complete tasks while narrating their thought process. We interviewed a total of 5 participants variety of majors, years in school, and backgrounds. Some knew what they wanted to do in high school and others are in the process of transferring. We identified 6 specific issues but across all of them we noticed two main themes:
Testers were unsure what certain things mean or there was a lack of information resulting in things being unclear to the user.
Testers looked for features and functions they were familiar with and got confused if they weren’t there or were hard to find.
User Testing
We took the feedback from user testing, revised the low fidelity prototype, then created a high fidelity prototype. The final result was an a social media/informational platform. IMajor has the following features:
Profile
Allows users to create connections and show who they are and what they have done.
Chat
Allows prospective students, current UT students, & Alumni to chat with each other.
Search
Follows a familiar structure like Instagram.
Allows users to find specific people, majors, minors, and certificates w/ additional filter options.
Enables users to save specific searches (efficient for future reference).
Info Page
Provides info about campus, majors, minors, certificates, and programs that are offered at UT.
Home Page
Allows users to find new content related to their profile, search history, interests, and goals.
High Fidelity Prototype of Profile Page
The next steps for IMajor would be to conduct another round of usability testing for the high fidelity prototype. We would then take the feedback and make further revisions to our app. After that we would need to present our app to UT administrators and IT department to get approval to create and release the app. Ideally we would partner with the IT department to code the app and keep the software up to date. From there we would gather information from the different departments - like what major each offers - and have the developers enter it into the app. Then we'd release the app. This isn't the end as part of design is continuing to revisit products and making them better.
Next Steps
Had I been able to alter the way the project was structured, I would've made it where everyone on the team equally worked on and made prototypes for each feature. I'd also like to change the amount and types of participants we recruited for usability testing. We were able to get current and past student participants but getting feedback from more UT staff, parents, and prospective UT students would have given us a better understanding of all our users needs.
reflections
IMajor
Current or prospective college student have to make many important academic decisions. The biggest of all is deciding on a major. Yet my team and I came to the realization that despite all students having to make this decision, many students encounter difficulties. We wanted to help students and thus IMajor was born.
The goal of this project was to create an effective solution to combat the uncertainty when deciding a college major and decrease the amount of potential internal transfers for UT students.
The project was designed so that each team member would be in charge of designing a feature of the app. I was in charge of the profile feature. This project was also intended to finish after the high fidelity prototype was created.
Description
UX/UI Designer
Team Leader
Researcher
Role
Yesenia Garcia
Justice Bustos
Collin Wolfhope
Nick Athanason
Team
By conducting background research about the problem, we identified several key insights:
Many people feel the process of choosing a major is overwhelming and complicated
Making an unsure or uninformed decision can increase the time and cost needed to finish a degree.
Deciding on a college major can feel binding when it comes to a students time, money, and especially future
Background Research
We researched existing sources people use to inform their decision and found that there wasn't one comprehensive source currently available. Each of the services and sources we examined had major weaknesses or only provided insight into one area of consideration.
Identified competitors and what they offer:
Handshake - Strengths/preferences match majors & careers
Command Education - Research what schools have to offer
LinkedIn - Allows observation of career paths
Reddit - Crowdsource for specific questions
Family & Friends - Convenient for many users
Ellucian - Grouped Majors
UT Department Websites - Descriptions of department and specific majors
Indeed - Discover different jobs
Academic Advisors - Have major-specific info
Competitive Analysis
After interviewing users about their experience with selecting their major, we created an affinity map to cumulate our findings and identify overarching themes.
Gathering Insights
Our next step was to create personas to help us better understand the different types of users and their needs.
Personas
We created a stakeholder map to identify who we will need to collaborate with through the design and implementation process.
Stakeholder Map
Our next step was to create personas to help us better understand the different types of users and their needs.
Ideation Sketches
The paper prototypes were further refined and led to the low fidelity prototypes. Due to the time constraint of the project, each team member was assigned a feature that they would develop the layout and design for.
Low-Fi Prototypes
We conducted usability testing on the low fidelity prototypes utilizing a think-aloud protocol were participants where asked to complete tasks while narrating their thought process. We interviewed a total of 5 participants variety of majors, years in school, and backgrounds. Some knew what they wanted to do in high school and others are in the process of transferring. We identified 6 specific issues but across all of them we noticed two main themes:
Testers were unsure what certain things mean or there was a lack of information resulting in things being unclear to the user.
Testers looked for features and functions they were familiar with and got confused if they weren’t there or were hard to find.
User Testing
We took the feedback from user testing, revised the low fidelity prototype, then created a high fidelity prototype. The final result was an a social media/informational platform. IMajor has the following features:
Profile
Allows users to create connections and show who they are and what they have done.
Chat
Allows prospective students, current UT students, & Alumni to chat with each other.
Search
Follows a familiar structure like Instagram.
Allows users to find specific people, majors, minors, and certificates w/ additional filter options.
Enables users to save specific searches (efficient for future reference).
Info Page
Provides info about campus, majors, minors, certificates, and programs that are offered at UT.
Home Page
Allows users to find new content related to their profile, search history, interests, and goals.
High-fi Prototype
The next steps for IMajor would be to conduct another round of usability testing for the high fidelity prototype. We would then take the feedback and make further revisions to our app. After that we would need to present our app to UT administrators and IT department to get approval to create and release the app. Ideally we would partner with the IT department to code the app and keep the software up to date. From there we would gather information from the different departments - like what major each offers - and have the developers enter it into the app. Then we'd release the app. This isn't the end as part of design is continuing to revisit products and making them better.
Next Steps
Had I been able to alter the way the project was structured, I would've made it where everyone on the team equally worked on and made prototypes for each feature. I'd also like to change the amount and types of participants we recruited for usability testing. We were able to get current and past student participants but getting feedback from more UT staff, parents, and prospective UT students would have given us a better understanding of all our users needs.
reflections
This doesn’t have to be goodbye.
Send me a message at leahwilliams2019@gmail.com and let’s start a conversation.
This doesn’t have
to be goodbye.