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Silicon Slugs is an application designed for University of California Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus to have essential information and services for the community.
Timeline : Nov 2022 - 2 Weeks
Team : 5 Members
Skills : UX Research, UX Design, Usability Testing
Role : User Research, User Flows and Personas, Ideation, Brainstorming and Sketching,
Wireframing and Prototyping, User Testing
Tools : Figma
As a college student, my peers and I faced challenges to access services within the campus. Moreover at few times we also missed information about important events being conducted on campus.
This sparked the question- why was there this disconnect in our lives?
The SVC campus contains a diverse demographic of Students, Faculty, Admin, Technical Support with different lived experiences, all sharing the goal of pursuing education, and often, networking with one another.
We observed people facing difficulties in accessing the facilities on campus by forgetting their ID cards, missed the important events and delay in service requests due to gaps in communication.
We also observed the overwhelming majority of students consistently brought smartphone, tablet, laptop to the campus. Therefore, an app was a great idea to solve this problem
To understand how people currently use the facility, we conducted an online survey with students and interviews with admin team. We wanted to know what our peers feel about our campus, what were their needs and pain points. Is it a real problem for them or do they think that accessing services at our campus isn't difficult?
We received 7 responses and this helped us target some problems to narrow down our topic.
Below are a few snapshots of the survey questions and of the responses we got.
We conducted semi-structured interview with note-taking and the participants were -
1. IT head of the campus
2. Admin of the campus
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1. How do you provide access to a student/faculty with the existing system
2. How does this access system work?
3. Why do you need the access card as well as access code to get into the facility?
4. What do you do when the student forgets the code/enter wrong code?
5. How do students currently raise tickets for the admin team?
6. How do you communicate the events taking place on campus with the students?
Below are some data samples of the students that helped us realise the problem and identify their needs.
❝... One thing that annoys me is that I have to scan my ID card and enter my pin a lot (ex. just getting water -> scan to get inside the classroom area -> scan again to get into the actual classroom). One time, it didn't even work when I tried to get back into Room 3218 (our classroom), so I had to knock and message people to let me in.❞
❝...A more centralized calendar of events would be nice. It’s really overwhelming to look through a bunch of slack channels trying to find event details.❞
❝...I wait by the door until someone shows up and pities me. It’s usually 5 minutes at most”.❞
1. To feel a sense of belonging within their community, with an ability to meet people when and where they are at their discretion.
2. To be able to access services and information readily in a manner that consolidates it into one platform.
3. Be granted a level of voice and input when participating in community matters (i.e., being in the loop with facilities staff).an informed and direct method for participating in community events without being left out due to unintentional unawareness.
From the surveys we could find out the pain points that helped us create the user persona. We created 1 user persona based on the survey and analysis.
Hi there, my name is Joe and I'm a 23-year-old masters student studying Natural Language Processing. I attend classes on campus four times a week, which I really enjoy. In addition to that, I'm always excited about the various interesting events taking place on campus, although at times I find it overwhelming to navigate through all the channels to find the events that suit my interests.
Users should be able to access the door through their virtual ID cards
Users should be able to view, register, have the details about the ongoing and the future events.
Make it easier for the students, faculty, and admin to report, track the issues.
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Click to view full Figma work file here ↓
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This was my first UX group project and I am grateful to have worked with awesome team members coming from different backgrounds in a share-n-learn atmosphere. On that note, a few things I’ve learned:
1. Experiencing the problem first hand is the best research. I was able to empathise with the problem as I myself faced similar problems as others. I could exactly feel what my peers talked about. Therefore, we could better understand and visualise the solution.
2. Do not assume! Since we had faced the similar issues we had some bias towards the design in the initial stages. When we went through the interview process and the feedback we got to know different perspective of the varied users.
3. Attention to detail. There were times when I missed paying attention to details initially. However, my team members and users helped me realise those details and eventually I was able to improve upon the same.
