Survey and interview responses

Our target group is undergraduate students at Wellesley, Olin, and Babson college. In order to learn more about the needs our customers, my team sent out a survey and conducted interviews. We received 68 survey responses and talked to 10 students. These are the key takeaways from the survey responses:

• On a scale from 1-5, 53% of respondents ranked their interest at a 4 or a 5 for joining projects at other colleges
• Main methods of promoting and finding projects are school websites, emails, and through mutual connections
• Some students want more connection among BOW students for the different perspectives it brings
• Current barriers to cross-campus collaboration are that it takes too much activation energy to coordinate between schools and that it would be harder to manage different working styles

Personas

From our interview and survey findings, we created 3 customer personas that reflect our stakeholder group.

• Ella the Olin student wants to join fun projects to meet people from different campuses. Olin has a lot of serious technical projects, so they are looking for other kinds of teams to join.
• Finley the Babson student is looking to create a startup, needs dedicated STEM majors to join his team to support backend roles, and has minimal experience working with students outside of Babson.
• Aleesha the Wellesley student wants to join a team of highly motivated students to work on long-term software projects with. She has joined organizations that were more for fun at Wellesley, so is looking for more serious projects.

Competitive analysis

We looked at similar, existing platforms and conducted some competitive analysis. This helped us identify where our design goals differ, aspects that we might want to incorporate to BOW platform, and where the inspirations fall short. My team looked at 4 main sites: Meetup, Eventbrite, Crunchbase, and AngelList Talent.

Meetup:
• Site's goal is to bring people together through shared interests and lets people search for events or groups- similar functionality to BOW Project Marketplace.
• Should try to avoid stacking group information in a single continuous scroll.

EventBrite:
• Platform for event planners to promote their events to event seekers, and event seekers can find events based on their interests and apply different filters.
• BOW Project Marketplace will have significantly less search results, so some filtering features such as tags may not yield helpful result.

Crunchbase
• Site provides strong summary of companies, including: size, location, funding status, site, talent search status, recent news, etc.
• BOW Project Marketplace is for student projects, so it would include different information.

AngelList Talent
• Website's target market is people looking for jobs, primarily those having already graduated college with prior work experience.
• Ability to search for companies by school or roles they are looking for could be a feature in BOW Marketplace.

Once we had our design idea and initial pages prototyped, we worked on iterating upon our prototype to improve responsiveness and professionalism.

Iterated prototype

Design Evaluations

Cognitive walkthrough



We conducted cognitive walkthroughs on 5 specific goals for our customers and examined specific tasks that they would need to complete to accomplish each goal.

We explored the following 5 customer goals:

• Post a project.
• Apply filters when searching for projects.
• Browse for projects.
• Find details about a project (from the browse page)
• Viwe a project you manage



The spreadsheet below shows whether all steps, signifiers, and feedback to accomplish each goal were present in our design.

Heuristic Evaluations



To further evaluate our current design, we received feedback from our classmates through heuristic evaluations. Our classmates evaluated our current design and examined its compliance to Jakob Nielsen's 10 general usability principles. The full reports can be seen on the Heuristic Evaluation Reports.

We received lots of valuable feedback from our classmates, and the following are the main areas of heuristic issues that they found in our design:

• Consistency in buttons, icons, organization, and page size
• Need for aesthetic and minimalist design on the home page and project description page
• Lack of customer control and freedom in going back to a previous page and closing out pages
• Flexibility and efficiency of use in the lack of scroll bars, redundant search bars, and lack of sorting feature when exploring projects

Usability testing



The last way that we received feedback for our current design was by conducting 2 usability tests. Full details can be found in the Usability study plan and the Usability test report.

The main findings from the Usability Tests are:

• When creating a project and listing open roles, the term Role is unclear to users. Users were not sure if this meant the project creator's role or what qualifications were required to be in the project.
• The project description when creating a project is too open ended in that it does not require specific details. This leads to vague and short descriptions.
• The project image is not specific enough and users were unsure if they should upload a team photo, a general photo that aligns with the project, or an image of the project.



From these findings, we created recommendations to incorporate in our design

• Add an information icon next to the recruiting field to clarify that the project creator can include specific roles that they are recruiting for.
• Incorporate a minimum and maximum word count for the project description.
• Include suggestions as to what type of images are appropriate to add.

Design Modifications

Based on design evaluations and feedback, our team implemented significant design modifications. Below, the main changes are highlighted.

Home page

From the home page, users are encouraged to either find a project or to post about a project. Some main changes are:

• Login and Sign Up buttons were added in the top right of the navigation bar if customers are not currently logged in, which clearly indicates their status and to allow users to access the buttons from any page.
• Overall tone of the page was modified. We received feedback that our website made them feel like they were applying to a job, so we decided to include more engaging and less professional elements to compel our customers to explore functionality of our site.
• Site colors were utilized more to draw the customer's attention to buttons and interactive features and optimized elements to better showcase site functionality available immediately to the them.

Project create page

Main revisions to this page are:

• Increase customer freedom and control by adding a cancel button that lets the customer exit the page with a warning popup message that customers will have to confirm before leaving the page.
• Adding hints and recommendations by including word counts, adding directions to the image and tags field, and adding an info bubble next to recruiting.

Browse Page

Main revisions to this page are:

• Tile format for project cardsto fit more projects on a given page instead of having a singular card stretch the entire screen, which requires the customer to scroll through a long list of results.
• Information included in project cards was shortened and condensed by including logos, shorter descriptions, and utilizing icons instead of labels.

Filter menu

Main revisions to this page are:

• Remove unnecessary filters like commitment to make sure all filters yield some results, since we anticipate that the platform will only host a couple hundred projects maximum.
• Resolve consistency and user freedom issues by making sure the icon used for the school name is on page and by adding an exit X in the top right.

Shortcomings and Omissions

There were a couple features we were hoping to implement but were unable to due to the time constraint of the course:

• Save feature for projects
• Redo the information layout for upcoming events and include it in the project description page
• Success messages after a project is successfully created, deleted, edited, or saved
• Not all pages and features are fully functional

Key Insights

• Need for a minimally invasive way of explaining certain terminology we were using. In order to present the customer with additional information at their demand, we decided to include a clickable info icon that displayed a message explaining what words and phrases mean.
• Ensure that features guide users to use the site in the most productive way possible with controls instead of completely freeing the customer to use the site in ways that might be unproductive. We realized that while customers may desire certain functionality, enabling them to use the site to their own detriment is something that we should control for.
• Importance of color to make it fit the customer group we are designing for. We learned how the colors we had chosen (and the lack thereof) led classmates doing our heuristic evaluations to think they were applying to a job, rather than joining a college project. Knowing the importance of choosing the right color palette will be extremely important going forward with future designs.
• Utilize icons to convey the same information with less text and information overload. This was applied greatly in redesigning project cards, and was much clearer than when everything was in text form. It also gave us a great chance to apply a concept we had learned from the last phase to utilize human reading patterns.