Major Matcher

Courtney Dutton

From sketches to the nal website and everything in between.

INFO 360 Autumn 2012

Process Book

Table of Contents

Introduction Problem Brainstorming Field Interviews Prototyping User Testing Video Prototype Personal Involvement

Introduction
This process book describes the design process that took us from an idea to a solution to a problem related to surviving college. We chose to address the issue around how college students can con dently choose a major that they are interested in pursuing. The major design decisions are documented through this process book. Although the entire project was a group collaboration, this process book will focus on my perspectives and involvement within the group on each aspect of the design process. My intentions are to give you, the reader, an inside look at what took to develop a solution for students who are struggling to uncover the major that is a match for them.

Problem
Our problem stemmed from my initial brainstorm the rst day of class. The signi cant parts that we held onto and allowed to evolve were:

The causes of [not knowing what careers are related to a major or what professionals in those fields are doing] creates the problem of a lack of connection between the academic major and the real world applications of that education. With this current disconnect, students have a hard time pinpointing what their interests are and what major would best fit those interests.

Our goal with this problem was to approach it uniquely to provide a novel way of approaching the struggle around how to nd information about majors which will help a student design on what to pursue.

Brainstorming
During a class activity, our group, came up with ideas on notecards for potential solutions for our problem. The text to the right represents the best idea from our note cards. This idea came from my partner, Sean. Stumble Upon for interesting articles and leads to potential majors For a homework assignment we individually brainstormed 40 potential solutions to our problem. As a group we initially decided to pursue two ideas. The rst idea stemmed from the best notecard idea shown above. This idea evolved to include videos in the Stumble Upon idea.

A website called Stumble Upon Majors that finds interesting articles relevant to majors that correlate with your academic interests

The second idea that I came up with during my 40 ideas brainstorm was an interactive site that asked students questions based on their skills and acadmic interests which provided suggestions on majors based on the answers to those questions. This was speci c to majors at the University of Washington.

An interactive tool that uses user answers to basic quetsions to suggest majors

Our process for narrowing items down was based on how the entire group felt. The whole group really liked the novelty of the Stumble Upon idea but we needed to generate more than just one in order to turn in homework assignments. By generating a lot of novel ideas and also looking up current solutions we were able to narrow it down to two solid ideas to pursue.

From 145 ideas

down to 2 ideas

Field Interviews
In order to gain real insight to what actual students did to nd their major the group interviewed a total of six students in our class (two by each member in the group). Of the two informants that I interviewed they both held the relationship between the major they would pursue and how that correlated with their interests and skills as the highest determining factor. Both informants had some sort of grounded idea about what majors they wanted to pursure based on their interests and skills. They both seemed to do the research on their own to learn about the majors at the University of Washington. The other sources that provided some sort of help in deciding were advisors within the major and students currently in the major. With this information we were guided to focus on the aspect of providing a unique way of students to gain information about a variety of majors in one central format. We wanted the student to be able to get to experience some aspect of the major in order for them to decide whether their interests were piqued by the major or not. Below is the script for our interview questions:
1) When you were going through the process of looking for a major, which majors did you look into? 2) How thoroughly did you research these majors?(i.e.: which did you look at admission requirements and prerequisites for, did you look at their graduation requirements, etc) 3) What resources did you use to nd out more information about a major? Department website? A student? An advisor? A professor? A professional or alumni in that eld? This was the most important question that 4) What ultimately led you to choose and apply for a major and/or majors? provided the most insight in our interviews 5) How many majors did you apply for? 6) Did you have to apply to any majors multiple times? If so, which ones? 7) Did you have any idea going into college what you wanted to major in? General idea or speci c? 8) What was the general process you went through to choose a major? a) Was your grade or enjoyment of certain courses a factor for your decisions? b) Was your major a fall back plan? 9) Did your high school o er any guidance for choosing a major? 10) Did you feel that the college o ered enough information about the courses and majors you could look into? 11) After you were accepted to your major, did you learn about other majors you would have been interested in? (Basically want to learn if there were majors that weren't discussed or advertised as much) 12) Do you have a career in mind related to your major? 13) Did you have any stereotypes about any majors that deterred you from looking into them?

Prototyping
We started by creating two paper prototypes, one for the Stumble Upon idea and one for my interactive prototype. My rst prototype was created in Lucid Chart. I printed it out and used it for usability testing (the imporant pieces are shown right). From top to bottom, the rst question about skills, your suggested majors based o of the rst question, the second question about academic interests, and your nal results. The progress bar was on each page. When we had to come to an agreement on one design to pursure, we were able to keep the main underlying concepts of my prototype and incorportate them into the Stumble Upon prototype. The things we kept from my prototype design were the concept of showing the students their progress through the website so they could see their results prior to nishing and would know how soon they would see their results. The other thing that we ended up adding in a later prototype that was similar to the concept in my prototye with asking questions about interests and abilities, was that we added in a lters page that allowed students to preselect some academic interests in order to preliminarily narrow down the videos and articles that would be showed to them. The rst Stumble Upon prototype was created in Balsamiq and only consisted of three pages (shown below). The pages we created were a home page, a stumble page and a results page. This initial prototype required that users create an account in order for data to be saved or else at the end of their use they would need to send themselves an email of their results.

User Testing
At this point in the process we still had two prototypes in play. Sean and Lawrence performed usability tests on the initial Stumble Upon paper prototype. I performed two usablitity tests with my paper prototype for the interactive tool (shown left). There were a lot of overlooked issues with this prototype that were just silly but was really insightful for a future prototype. But the most bene cial aspect of this usability testing was nding out that the underlying concept of going through a process to nd your major was e ective. I performed two usability tests with the rst Stumble Upon prototype (bottom left) and also received a peer critique of it. The important insights I received from this were that the users wanted to be able to set recommendations/preferences/interests while making an account. The layout was not clear about what was a button and there was some confusing text. The ve star rating system seemed to be too much work, so a user suggested a thumbs up or thumbs down rating system. One user also said he would look at a brief overview of a major and potentially the careers for each major match. A second prototype was created in LucidChart for the design speci cation but was never user tested. We used the feedback from earlier user tests in order to develop this prototype. Based on feedback from our design speci cations we made necessary changes to include all necessary pages. The nal prototype was developed for the video prototype and for the nal design speci cations (the home page is shown below).

Video Prototyping
As mentioned on the usability testing page, the video prototype helped push us towards developing a more complete site prototype. Our video prototype was our way of putting our design in a real world scenario and showing o the useful and unique features in a way that showed them solving the problem. In class as a group we came up with the scenes and plot that we wanted to have in our video prototype. My rst sketch was very rough but was only intended to capture our ideas. Below is the redrawn storyboard for our video prototype. We used this storyboard to guide our lming but due to restrictions on people who participated in the lming we improvised and shot some new scenes that we thought of while lming. These improvised scenes conveyed the same if not a better message.

Personal Involvement
I created my own 40 ideas to help generate ideas for the team to use. I actively participated in the brainstorming activity in class. I came up with most of the interview questions that the team used in the interviews. I interviewed informants to obtain information for the basis of our design. I served as the group coordinator. I set up a group folder in Google Drive and shared everything with the other teammates, whether they took advantage of it or not. I also took a lot of notes in class to document the group deicions and delegation of work to reach milestones. For the rst draft of the design speci cations I wrote the scope. I also proof-read Lawrences problem statement and personas for grammatical correctness. Sean and I created the rst couple of pages for the second prototype ( rst one in LucidChart). As I noticed that we needed a more functional and realistic website I added pages to further extend a simulation of the actual experience for the website. I evaluated this prototype with the 10 heuristics. I also put everyone elses heuristics in the table, formatted it and turned it in. For the second draft of the design speci cations, I revised my scope and developed the visuals used in the speci cations that were not screenshots of the prototype, which included a complete site ow map, a table comparing the the assumptions and requirements for our users, a visual representing our audiences, and a table comparing the pros and cons of our design. I roughly sketched out the initial storyboard and then sketched a nicer version for submission. I shot the lm for the video while Sean was the actor. We both worked to improvise shots for the video. I was responsible screencasting the use of the prototype on the computer. Unfortunately, Sean was unable to open up either of the le formats I did them in on his MacBook. So he ended up having to redo them. I added even more pages to our prototype in order to provide an even more complete design for our nal design speci cation. For the nal design speci cation, I made any changes to the prototype Sean needed for the design details and rationale. I also revised the problem statement and the scope.