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I joined Significance Labs (a social innovation - driven incubator in Brooklyn) as an in-house design resource to support the fellows:
conduct user research
facilitate prototyping sessions
develop app flow diagrams and wireframes of first prototypes
OnTrack (now Yenko) aims to aid students who struggle with prioritizing their work load, especially when they also have to juggle financial aid requirements and pressures outside of school.
Context:
The national graduation rate for first generation, low income is extremely low.
The habits that ensure passing grades are ones that many first-generation college students simply never learned.
Regular tutoring and college counseling has a proven track record, but counselors at colleges and with non-profits can't scale high enough to reach all students in need of help.
Process:
We mapped out the data that encompasses a student’s life, tracing which information impacts financial aid standing, and how assignments are graded to culminate in a semester’s GPA.
Sitting with users and asking them to write out their week, their studying habits, helped us identify gaps in their scheduling. Instead of only talking, a physical research activity enabled us to realize students organized their time differently than we first
Interactions and the logic flow was tweaked constantly to better reflect our understanding of the school system, and the students.
Outcomes:
Mapping out the full feature flow helped clarify to the full team how complex any one feature is. It was easier to discuss where to start, and which features enabled the most pared down app that still hit our target vision.
We rolled out a first prototype at two Brooklyn community colleges, inviting students to sign up and track their assignment grades.
A mobile playbook for completing college. Presented at Significance Lab's Demo Day on August 12th 2014
Further exploration:
Experimenting with interactions to make the numbers more tangible
Making use of a more one-hand friendly interaction (drag gesture) to test out goal setting.
Toying around with how to communicate assignments, how they relate to each other across courses, and relative to each other in time.
Seeing progress over time (assignments accomplished so far in the semester) without losing screen real estate was a challenge. Here I toy with a dial-type calendar.
Covered in:
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