Workday Student: Student Goals

An opportunity to work with a client, Workday Student, with a large team of six under the MPS Project program (Carrie (Jiarui) Hu, Lulu Liang, Li Chai, Jie Li, Lynn Lin). As a UX team, we devised a research plan to validate the needs for a student goals tracking app. During the Fall 2019 semester, we conducted contextual interviews, ideated goal tracking related functions, created various prototypes, and tested these functions using guerilla-style usability testing. Most importantly, we learned about how a student's success in completing their goals is idiosyncratic and varies in stages depending on where they are on their journey.

Key questions

• How does a student define success? 

• How do students in different universities differ? 

• Is a goal tracking app needed? 

Contextual interviews

We surveyed the stakeholders our client was interested in to learn more about how they felt about their current goal tracking practices. This included 20 Cornell University students, 5 advisors, and 5 administrators. 

Affinity Diagramming

After the surveys and interviews, we constructed an affinity diagram to group our findings into clusters. These clusters will help us define our project goals and narrow down on focus areas for the application.

What was learned

Students use several apps and methods to keep track of goals. Even so, many students have some difficulty keeping their goals because of external and internal obstacles. Both advisors and administrators just want to be able to help their students in any way that they can. 

We also learned that students are on various stages of their academic career. Depending on which stage they are on, the types of goals they have differ.

We categorized it into 4 stages:

1. No goals

   • These are students who do not really have goals that they define yet

   • Typically, these are students still trying to explore their options in college

2. Vague goals

   • These students have some idea of what they are trying to achieve

   • However, they do not have a specific plan on how to achieve their goals

3. Specific goals

   • These students have a goals in mind

   • They also have a solid plan on how to get to it

4. Success

   • These students have reached their goals!

What is Success Defined by a Student?

Through the affinity diagram, we also noticed what success means. For a student, their definition of success is to live a happy life, but while in college, success is to find a career.

Project Goal

Students have points in their success journey where they derail. We need to find those points and support the student in putting them back on track.

Ideation

Each team member brainstormed app functions to help with goal tracking. We each sketched the user interfaces to discuss final screens for implementation. 

We worked with our client to discuss our ideas and then proceeded to implement Figma prototypes with their feedback. 

Sketches

Here are some initial sketches I’ve brainstormed, detailing some functions to explore.

Prototyping & Testing

Figma mid-fidelity

A quick implementation of our sketch ideations, sticking to black and white color schemes to let users focus on function, rather than aesthetic. I was in charge of the My Goals function.

Usability Testing 

We separated into pairs and took turns asking 3 Cornell students questions during guerilla-style usability tests. We printed out our prototype screens for testing. 

Tasks:

1. Use our app to get some career recommendations and set Data Scientist as your goal.

2. Use our app to find and favorite an event related to Data Scientist.

3. Use our app to add a course and skill that helps you become a Data Scientist.

What was learned

• The app was too complex. We had too many functions, and so we need to narrow down on what students really needed

• Each function works well individually but the flow as a whole doesn’t work smoothly between functions

• All 3 users did not expect to see “Courses” and “Skills” under the My Goals and Resource function

• All 3 users expressed positive towards having alumni feedback and statistics very helpful in making their decisions

• There was the problem of our solution being just another app

Around this time, we decided to focus on the first two stages (No goals & Vague goals) because the original scope would be too large for the semester and because we needed to focus in on core features by not having too many functions.

Figma high-fidelity 

Taken from what was learned from our mid-fidelity, we reduced the functions and added more details to test a more realistic looking app. Here are the mockups for the My Goals function.

Usability Testing

Testing was done using our prototype on a phone to enact a real app. We expanded our pool of testers to Ithaca College students. For this iteration, we tested 2 Cornell University students and 2 Ithaca College students.

Tasks: 

1. Find an interesting career through taking professional test

2. Add careers to your interesting career list (data scientist)

3. Set data scientist as your goal

4. Favorite an event and contact a club related to data scientist

5. Find a course(CS 1133) and a skill (Python)

   1. Add them to your course goal and skill goal

   2. Mark the course and skill you just added as completed

What was learned

• Students are on different stages and therefore would use some functions more than others. Tailoring the app to fit each users’ needs would help them, no matter which stage they’re on

  • i.e. Students with no goals enjoyed using the Explore function to help them discover different paths, but the functions does not help with making decisions

  • i.e Students with vague goals said they wouldn’t use the Explore function as much, but rather, would use the My Goals feature to try to establish a solid plan

• To avoid being “just another app”, the solution needs to connect and incorporate all the current tools their universities/colleges use

• Each university/college have their own set of tools that their students may or may not already use. The solution should not only work with students’ needs, but also fit within the institutions’ systems

Poster Session

At the end of the semester, we compiled a final report to the client and participated in a poster session open to the Cornell community.

Reflections

Summary

Revisit key questions

• How does a student define success? 

  • Each student has a different definition of success

  • Their end goal is to be happy, but the journey differs

  • In college, success is usually defined by obtaining a career

• How do students in different universities differ? 

  • Students’ goals in college is to find a career

  • Each school has their own systems and tools to help their students succeed

• Is a goal tracking app needed? 

  • Goal tracking does help the student succeed, especially when they are more engaged with making their plans

    • However, if the student feels like they are in a good situation, they will not use the app

  • Therefore, it depends on where the student is at on their success journey

Future Work

We had to reduce the scope of the project because of time constraints. However, if we had more time, here are 4 points of future work we’d like to explore. 

1. Implementation and larger-scaled, unbiased usability tests

   • Our current tests were mainly small tests, with…

     • About 4 to 6 people per testing session

     • Mainly female participants

     • Majors related to math and science

   • To balance our pool of participants, we’d also want to test with more people and with more diversity

2. Incorporate other types of goals

   • Students have a range of reasons for why they’re in college

     • Not just career related goals

   • Allow students to track personal goals

3. Interview at even more colleges

   • Each school has a different system of handling a student’s journey through college

   • Interviewing at other colleges would only bring more valuable insights on how to help students succeed

4. Focus on other stakeholders

   • We were unable to continue testing with our other stakeholders from the beginning of the semester: administrators and advisors

     • These resources want to help students succeed in anyway they can

     • We also found that students found these resources helpful when they did reach out to them, so finding a way to strengthen the bridge between them would be a good investment

Final Thoughts

This project was one of my favorite projects of the semester! Since we had the liberty of devising our own research plan, with the support and guidance from our client, I felt that I gained valuable experience as if I was working for their company, rather than just another class project.

It was also a very interesting experience working with a large team. Unlike my undergraduate studies, my MPS team all had similar interests in UX, but we each had diverse backgrounds and skills. This provided me an environment where I was able to teach and learn from my own team members.

Lastly, this project confirmed my interests in research, specifically to go out into the field and learn about how users perceive and use the things around them :)

THANKS FOR READING!