Objective
Year: 2021
Role: UX Researcher, Research Coordinator (Team of 6)
Research Method: Stakeholder and User Interviews (2 rounds), Empathy Mapping, Personas
Research Type: Exploratory UXR
Company: University of California, Irvine

Background and Goals

Our initial conversations with our partners came through as support for an existing project regarding student data and organization. There were concerns that prior research focused primarily on undergraduates and did not account for the needs of grad students.

Ultimately, the goal of this project was to support the academic success of the graduate students and we were allowed to “blue-sky” our scope, giving us the flexibility to explore and propose solutions with minimal limitations.

Through our research, we found that grad students were largely lacking support from both their peers and faculty, leaving them feeling unsupported and isolated. We concluded our final problem statement: How might we support graduate students who feel lost accessing different on-campus resources?



Some of our generative research goals include:

- Discovering personas, user journeys, and possible scopes.
- Refine major pain points and essential user journeys, prioritize concerns


Methods:



Through user interviews, empathy mapping, and personas, we were able to further define our scope and understand the common frustrations of university graduate students.



We conducted two rounds of interviews:

Round 1 - Stakeholder: Seven graduate division faculty and staff members

Round 2 - User: 14 Students including Master's and Doctorate students.



Major insights identified through our interviews:





To further emphasize with the users, we utilized empathy mapping to understand what users may think, feel, and do.





Personas were then created based on real interviews with grad students from the University of California, Irvine.





Research Impact:



Three common trends identified in our research include the need to:





Strategic Impact:





Informed product design direction and scope backed by UX research



Provided valuable information on a commonly overseen user to be leveraged by the university for use on additional products and projects



Learning outcomes:

You are not the user – most of our impactful points of information came directly from hearing pain points from the students and were not prioritized or unknown by faculty and staff. Not only were students excited about the prospect of our solution, but they also reached out separately to inquiry involvement.

In times of uncertainty and turbulence. Providing methods of providing psychological safety and a sense of community are equally, if not more, important than providing functional support.