UconnecT
A collaborative platform that aims to transform the University of Toronto (UofT) students' group work experience, allowing students to engage synchronously, and efficiently with team members.
Project Overview
In the last 8 weeks of my first semester, I was working on a project to help the University of Toronto-Innovation Hub explore the question:
"how to improve students' collaborative experience?"
Problem
In looking at the UofT’s integrated learning experience, we found that Quercus, the current learning platform to be a rigid, instructor centric system that fails to take into account students needs when it comes to collaboration.
User Group
UofT students who are struggling with collaborative group work.
Outcome
We bridged the gap by building a dynamic digital platform called "UconnecT" that allows
Delegate - Integrate - Collaborate all in one tool.
End Result
01
The problem
A million tabs open?
Yes... we've all been there.
Maybe there is a better way to bring work together,
manage all in one place!
The Connect 6ix team believes collaboration skills are critical in both academic and professional settings. Nonetheless, our team discovered that students feel lost when it comes to group work and are having a hard time collaborating effectively. Thus, we hope to learn what difficulties UofT students have struggled with online group work as well as their expectations of outstanding ideal online group work.
02
Research Insights
We adopted questionnaires and interviews as our research methods. All the participants were UofT students that have been part of a group assignment within the last 12 months. From the 23 eligible survey responses and 5 interview participants, here is what we learned
Challenges Identified
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Scheduling
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Organization
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Platform benefits
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Online vs In-person
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Synchronous vs. Asynchronous work
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Communication
Interview Quote
"Quercus (the current learning platform) is not a collaborative tool, it's simply 1-1,
but it should be 1-many, or
many to many."
Ideal Group Work
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Many to Many collaboration
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Workloads reduced
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More diverse ideas
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Improves networking
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Self-identifying strengths
03
Persona
Our group created a persona named"Greta the Grad", to help actualize the user and allow ourselves to understand the needs and desires of the user group.
Highlights
Obstacle
She is shy to speak up when she encounters a problem because she doesn't want to bother other people.
Bio
She is not very sociable and prefers to work independently.
Obstacle
With her forgetfulness and habit of procrastinating under stress along with approaching deadlines, she finds it hard to balance her work.
Goal
Maintain good grades and balance work and school while working efficiently with group.
04
Empathy Map
In order to gain deeper insights into our user group, we made an Empathy Map for our Persona
"Greta the Grad", using real info and quotes from engagements during the interview and survey, to help us empathize and synthesize learning from the research phase.
05
As-Is Sceanrio
In order to build a collective understanding of user flows, our team created a realistic scenario for "Greta the Grad", By painting a “rich picture” of a set of events, we hope to explore new ideas, and find the right problems to solve.
Draft version during group brainstorm
Greta's group project - Before
User Painpoints
Problem 1
Unable to multitask different projects across various platforms
Problem 2
Hard to find a
good time for group meeting.
Problem 3
Procrastinates under stress while keeping up with approaching deadlines
Problem 4
Wants to work individually despite being assigned a group work
05
As-Is Sceario
Then, our group drafted the Need Statement for "Greta the Grad" according to her user journey and pinpoints we discovered.
How can we help
Greta the Grad
to accomplish her needs?
06
Ideation - 👩🏻💻Team Lead
As a team lead for the ideation session, I organized
2 rounds of rapid idea generation with each team of six members putting together 8 Big ideas on a sticky note for each round.
Then, we sorted ideas based on shared themes or target pain points and allow members to vote for their favorites with a total of 8 votes comprised of
4 votes for feasibility and 4 votes for impact.
Initial Ideation during studio
Ideation - Round 1
Here are the ideas and sketches we generated after the first round along with votings.
Ideation - Round 2
Prioritization Grid
Then, we started the second round of Ideation and sorted all the valuable ideas into a Prioritization Grid. By determining how impactful and feasible something are, we can quickly prioritize what we need to do and ensure that we're always working on the most important tasks.
Home Run
High Feasibility and High Impact
Group Finder
Find group members easily
Status Update
Online/In the zone/Need a hand mode
Team Contract
Helps establish team contract; clarify each member's duty and set group expectations
Big Bets
Lower Feasibility and High Impact
Q-Suite
Platform links collaborative tools all in one place
Sync Deliverable
Extract and sync all deliverables with optional timelines
Meeting Scheduler
Schedules meetings around obligations
Quick Wins
High Feasibility and Lower Impact
Motivation Sation
Visual indicator of individual's progress
Running late Alert
Keep group members updated if running late
07
To-Be Sceario
Then, we applied all the selected ideas to our As-Is Scenario and created the To-Be Scenario, which could allow us to
measure, examinie and evaluate possible events that could take place in the future and making sure that we are on the right path to solve potential problems identified above.
Draft version during group brainstorm
Greta's group project - After
What changed in Greta's Journey?
Did we help Greta solve her problems?
Yes! we surely did ;)
08
Prototype and Evaluation
👩🏻💻Co - Lead
At this stage of the project, our team initially started with low-fidelity sketches with six features we selected from the last stage.
Initial Version of low-fi sketches
With the mindset of "Good design should be able to tell a story", I suggested our team utilize our time wisely, keep our focus on the few main features and convert them into a user journey. After careful consideration and internal discussion, the three features we ended up choosing are:
Q-Suite
Platform links collaborative tools all in one place
Status Update
Online/In the Zone/Need a hand mode
Meeting Scheduler
Schedules meetings around obligations
What we hope to Achieve
We created three statements, starting with three elements
"Who" - Who are the target groups to use the platform
"What"- What are the benefits they can gain from the platform
"Wow"- What makes our platform special
Lean Evaluation & Mid-Fi Prototype
👩🏻💻Co - Lead
Then, our group conducted the Lean Evaluation with users on the Low-fidelity prototype, generated many valuable insights, and applied the changes to our Mid-Fidelity prototype. Feel free to check out our clickable version here.
As the Co-Lead for the Prototype session, I was responsible for designing 80% of the overall medium-fidelity prototypes, all the high-fidelity prototypes, and built our mobile version of the platform on Figma. The following are the features I generated along with the problems that our group hopes to achieve earlier in the research and ideation stage. Annotations are also listed below for additional guidelines.
Problem #1: Juggling between multiple platforms
Initially, our group used Google Suite as a reference when designing this feature, we wanted to build a platform that allows UofT students to manage all their projects, and files, for all their courses in just one shared space. In this way, they will no longer need to multitask between various platforms with over 50 tabs open at the same time, so we successfully solved our users' pinpoint using the feature "Q-Suite"
Problem #2: Shy to speak up and ask for help
This feature "Status Update" can help students like our persona "Greta the Grad" get the help they need with just one click. This feature also allows users to adjust their status accordingly. For example, if someone likes to work individually and does not want to be interrupted by others, they can simply click the status button and change it to "In the Zone" mode.
Problem #3: Hard to find a good time for group meeting
It is always painful for team members to find the good time for a group meeting. However, now, within the feature "Meeting scheduler", group members are encouraged to sync their calendars.
Using the shared collective calendar, users can now dive right into scheduling in 5 simple clicks.
Did we achieve the
3 Statements
we hope to accomplish?
Linking back to our Goal
I matched our goals with the features as follows
Q-Suite
UofT students who struggle to keep track of all their files can manage it in one unified spot.
Status Update
UofT students can ask for help without saying a single word.
Meeting Scheduler
UofT Students who just formed a new group can set up meetings with just 6 clicks
Yes! We surely did :)
09
Evaluation & Next Step
Our group conducted usability testing and interviews with 4 users as part of the evaluation. We adopted 5 seconds test as a way to better understand the user's first impression of the app.
We observed participants using the application and incorporated think-aloud tests to better
understand participant mindset while documenting all the details during the observation.
After testing, we also conducted post-task interviews to understand users' experiences and collected feedback. Following are some key results and insights we gained from this session.
Average Time Completing Tasks
Feedback & Comments
Feedback & Comments
Next Step
Having described our journey so far, let me go over our next steps:
Develop a desktop/web version of the platform
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Allow users to edit documents more efficiently than on a mobile device
Go back to the basics of LEAN UX principles
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Reconfigure teams to explore more ideas
Prioritize features for Qsuite and work with engineering
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Build a functional MVP that we can pitch to the Innovation Hub
Reflecting & What I learned
This is my very first design project in my very first semester in the very first UXD course I took in the Master of Information Program. I and my group members finished this project from the start to finish
within just 2 months. I learned how to use Figma, Balsamiq, Miro, Canva, and many different visual design tools and gained lots of very valuable insights from this project.
Design something from scratch is difficult, but rewarding.
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Design is not just about prototyping. There are many stages in every UX design journey and each of them is very important.
Projects get messy
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It is essential to document every step along the way and make note of changes made during the process.
Results are not what matters the most. The process is.
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we learned, gained, and improved so much from the process!
Me and my lovely team members
In short, I am proud of both myself and my group for completing this work!