Adulting
Freelance Project for RIT
A platform for college students who have just begun an independent life to quickly and accurately collect a variety of skills and life experiences.
OVERVIEW
When teenagers become adults, they have a lot of responsibilities and requirements that haven’t been learned in school or from their parents. Most college students move out of their parents’ house when they go to college. They start to handle everything by themselves and realize they have a lot of trivia to deal with, like cooking, cleaning, managing their own money, etc. These were usually done by their parents but now become the most troublesome things.
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
UX Designer
METHODS & TOOLS
Contextual Inquiry
Affinity Diagram (Realtimeboard)
Persona (Xtensio)
Prototype (Balsamiq & Sketch)
DURATION
Three Months
Sep - Dec, 2017
Are You
Struggled to
Begin an
Independent
Life?
Our mission is to help college students to adapt to an independent life as soon as possible. Our team tries to design a platform for RIT students who are struggled with this kind of new life to quickly and accurately collect a variety of skills and life experiences.
• Project Timeline •
USER RESEARCH
Get to Know New College Students
In order to understand what are the most struggled things for new college students, what do students want to learn as adults, how do students usually do when they come across troublesome tasks, what tools students use to keep track of their responsibilities as adults, etc., we conducted a semi-structured interview with our proposed stakeholders, RIT staff and RIT students.
PARTICIPANTS
12 participants totally
Including 3 RIT staff who deal with student affairs, 9 RIT students
CONTENTS
Semi-structured interview
10 prepared questions for students
4 prepared questions for staff
DURATION
20 minutes / per participant
User Quotes:
I can't remember in which way the clothes should be washed…
I need to learn many car-related things like noise, windows, oil change, tire change and so on…
I find that doing taxes is really very confusing and difficult…
Based on the data we collected, we interpreted the answers of the participants to more than 500 post-it notes by RealtimeBoard. In order to classify the issues and apply to our design, we reorganized the notes and finally built a hierarchical affinity diagram. We summarized the problems in 5 categories which is used in our final prototype.
• Affinity Diagram •
In order to show the classic characteristics of our target users, as well as the common frustration, motivation, needs, and goals, we came up with three personas based on the interviews and the affinity diagram we built. One is a freshman at RIT as a primary persona. The other two are both secondary personas, with one senior student and one staff at RIT.
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
• Personas •
ITERATIVE DESIGN
Paper Sketch & Low-Fidelity Prototype & High-Fidelity Prototype & Usability Testing
To use our imagination and enrich our ideas we met up, brainstormed and discussed different ideas about what features the system should have, outlined what some screens could be like. Also, we evaluated every idea, summarized each essence, combined and improved some of them. Finally, we came up with this final paper prototype.
Based on our discussion and the paper prototype, we extended some necessary details of the features and made a low-fidelity prototype on Balsamiq, for both web and mobile(responsive) as follows.
• Low-Fidelity Prototype for Mobile •
• Low-Fidelity Prototype for Web •
• High-Fidelity Prototype for Web •
After several discussion generated by the low-fidelity prototype, and several iterative designs and the heuristic evaluation in the group, we made a relatively final high-fidelity prototype using Sketch.
• More Responsive Prototype for Mobile Devices •
Although usability testing is not required in this project, I personally conducted several user tests. And the results came out pretty well: the user flow and most of the designs got good feedback in the usability testing. Yet I also identified some usability issues and would be working on to improve them. Please stay tuned and let me know if you have any feedback!