Husky Companion
An app for UW students new to the Seattle area to get acclimated more easily.
Role
UX Researcher
Timeframe
7 weeks
Methods
Surveys
Interviews
Affinity Diagrams
Design Space
Problem
There is no all-encompassing platform to help new UW students build community and gain familiarity with the Seattle area.
Paradigm
We followed a value-sensitive design paradigm, centered around helping students establish Seattle as their “home away from home.”
Questions
What type of content do users want to see on our platform? How can we help our users build community and make Seattle more like home?
User Research
To inform our design, I wrote surveys and conducted user interviews to help our team better understand our users’ needs. I chose these methods because together these tools give us a more holistic view of the problem space.
Surveys
Rationale: Surveys would help us corroborate our insights from the interviews and supplement them with quantitative data.
Advantages: Surveys would more efficiently reach a wider audience to give us a broader dataset that is more concrete and quantitative. The broadness of the data would also give us a higher resolution to determine which features are the most important and by how much.
Disadvantages: Surveys would be less flexible than interview conversations and questions would have to be more generic for a wide audience, leaving room for misinterpretation.
Semi-Structured User Interviews
Rationale: User interviews would give us insights that would allow us to more adequately serve our stakeholders.
Advantages: Due to the fluidity of conversation in an interview, user interviews would give us a much deeper and more thorough insight into stakeholder needs.
Disadvantages: While thorough, user interviews can be time-consuming, and data from them can be hard to meaningfully quantify. This is why we used them to gain a general understanding rather than specific actionable items.
Research Findings
Based on the user interviews and survey responses, we created an affinity diagram for us to use as a guide when ideating our design solution. The affinity diagram helped us identify patterns and which stakeholder needs were most important to focus on.
Key Findings
From the survey, it was discovered how important relationships are, with 92.8% of respondents stating that family or friends/community were what they missed most about where they were from.
Search engines, Google Maps, and Instagram are the top resources that people are using to explore Seattle.
The sense of "home" is closely linked to community.
A high sense of safety and security is important for a place to feel like home.
There is some frustration around being able to meet new people through common hobbies.
Design Solution
Selection Criteria
Using the affinity diagram generated by surveys and interviews, our team determined two selection criteria upon which to select a subset of our proposed features for our low-fidelity prototype.
The first criterion, app initiative, focused on reducing the active work users would have to do by doing the work upfront for them. We wanted the extent of the users’ effort to be deciding whether or not to, for example, participate in an event or connect with another user, rather than finding these things on their own.
The second criterion, low barrier of entry, strived to produce an app that required minimal effort to begin providing benefits to the users. This mindset led to decisions like shortening the onboarding interests survey and allowing single sign-on for users to register with their existing UW student account.
Selected Features
Using the selection criteria, we brainstormed a solution involving group bucket lists. This would allow users to foster a community of meeting new people. These bucket lists and groups would be generated based on users’ interests. Additionally, we wanted the platform to have a certain level of security and to cater to UW students, so a UW account would be needed for users to join.
Reflection and Learnings
The biggest challenge we encountered was identifying a scope that would allow us to create a prototype within 10 weeks. As the team’s UX researcher, my greatest concern was that a tight timeline would lead to a lack of interview, survey, and user testing data. Without adequate data, we would not be able to fully address the needs of our stakeholders. Ultimately, we were able to determine a scope by referring back to our core value of creating a platform to help UW students new to Seattle build new relationships.
Overall, this experience allowed me to focus on demonstrating my research abilities and develop as an individual UX researcher within a product team. I was able to learn more about working with teammates who were relying on my research to inform their designs.