Google Internship - Design Exercise
PROJECT BACKGROUND:
I was really excited to receive a design challenge from Google to test my skills in order to secure a position in their internship program in the summer of 2019. I had 7 days to complete the project so it was a great learning experience to work through the design thinking process under such time constraints. I am happy with what I produced and I will take you through the process in this post.
The brief:
A new school year is approaching and the orientation team is looking to you for some design expertise. Please create your proposal based on the option below:
Design an experience for new students to browse, search, and propose new student organizations. Provide your overall process, a wireframe flow, and one to two screens at higher fidelity.
Step 1:
User Research
I first conducted user research in the form of interviews and focus groups. I wanted to understand what is like for new students joining a university and gain insights into some of the problems they encounter. I began follow the by empathizing with the user group, to identify how they choose a student organization to join.
Some of the key insights gathered from the interviews were as follows:
People join organizations to meet new people or to continue a hobby in a new location.
People do not join organizations because it clashes with their class timetable or they are apprehensive about not knowing other members.
People would like schools to suggest organizations to them, based on their program and extracurricular interests.
The interviews allowed for a persona to be created, which guided the design process for the rest of the exercise.
User Persona
Secondary Research
In addition to user research, I also conducted secondary research into current universities and their school organizations. This was done to learn about systems that are currently being used by universities to identify features worthy of emulation. This was a beneficial exercise as it identified the problems users faced using current systems, which allowed for the design of innovative solutions.
Some of the problems identified are highlighted below.
1. Login details are required.
2. Different search patterns.
3. Creating an organization is difficult.
All students are required to login to the university portal to access the list of school organizations. The login details contain the students email address and student ID number. This insight provided an opportunity to create personalized experiences for each student. For example, organization suggestions based on students with a similar profile.
Given the large number of organizations within a school or university, the information is typically organized in lists (A-Z) or categories (eg. faculty, sport). As a result of the user testing conducted, I discovered that both lists and categories are invaluable for users depending on their user journey. Lists were typically used by users who knew what they were searching for and wanted to access the information quickly. Categories were commonly used by users who did not have a specific organization in mind and wanted to browse and discover potential organizations. Integrating both patterns into the design was imperative to satisfy both common user journeys and provide the user with intuitive choice.
Currently, creating or proposing a new organization is a tedious process for students. This complicated process caused majority of the participants in the user test to fail the task or give up. The process involves multiple steps, with each step requiring involvement and approval from many school and faculty members. It should also be noted that every school in the user test required a minimum number of members to establish a new organization. This is a potential deterrence. Improving the proposal process was a critical user issue to address in this design exercise.
Step 2:
Wireframe Flow
Both the user research and secondary research conducted highlighted the key user issues that needed to be solved in the design exercise. I decided to split the wireframe flows into the three distinct user tasks: Browsing, Searching and Proposing new organizations. This allowed for each task to be mapped out clearly and to determine the ease of use and satisfaction for the user performing different tasks in the same portal. See below images of the wireframe flows created.
On-Boarding/Searching
Browsing Organizations
Proposing a New Organization
Step 3:
High Fidelity Screens
The two screens I decided to turn to high-fidelity was the home search screen and also the organizations profile page. I wanted to focus on this because I felt they highlighted both strong interaction design and visual design.
Organisation page.
Application home screen.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I found the experience incredibly insightful. Having to go through the design process in such a short amount of time allowed me to advance in my skills of time management and design thinking. I would recommend any fellow student (masters or undergrad) to apply to internship programs as even the application process is a great learning experience.