Guiding Angel
A PARTNERSHIP COMMUNITY THAT TAIWANESE STUDENTS LACK
I translated the original version into English version for this case study.
Skip to the final solutionContext
“Have you ever felt lost about your future career?”
This question is the beginning of this journey. At that time, most of my friends and even I were experiencing such emotions. I found it was a common issue for college students in Taiwan, so I brought this question into a service design course. I collaborated with 6 teammates from various majors. we used the design thinking methodology to research why this psychological issue is commonly troubling college students and tackle it.
Timeline
Sep-Dec 2022
12 weeks
Tools
Figma
Miro
ChatGPT3
Role
User Research
User Interviews
Service Design
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Team
1 computer science student
1 information student
1 economics student
3 business students
Problem
Starting From A Serious Educational Issue
Our goal of the project was to design a service to alleviate students’ anxiety about their future career. To be honest, it was a really huge and intangible educational issue. We believed there were tons of products and services trying to solve it, but why do college students still feel lost? Apparently, there was a gap between current solutions and what do we truly need. And that’s what we wanted to know.
To turn the vague problem into a specific, we started to conduct competitive analysis and user interviews to discover more insights.
Discovery
Services that offer both career orientation and personalization Were rare
Initially, we did research on existing solutions. We found that while some products and services help teenagers understand various academic disciplines and careers, they lack personalization. Other solutions, like workshops, offer more interaction and personalization but fail to provide opportunities to communicate with real-world professionals. This result was only a reference for us to explore the market potential, but we needed more insights to define the right problems.
User Research
To obtain more insights from our target audience, we conducted user research. To obtain higher quality data, we first defined the purpose of the entire user research: to understand why college students still feel lost and how they explore their interest and career path. After the interviews, we arranged and categorized these behavioral variables, and finally produced the user models.
PS: you will notice that I mostly use "we" instead of "I" here because we worked as a group during the research phase. And I learned the principles behind each research tool and understood why we could combine them into a combo.
Conducting User Interviews
We interviewed 15 college students from various majors, and obtained many different perspectives, as each person's experience varies greatly. Therefore, we kept going to uncover more findings
User Models and Persona
Based on the key values from the Affinity Map, we defined multiple behavioral variables. Although we categorized four different user groups from the interviewees, we focused on one model and created the persona as the primary user for the project.
Brain Dumping & Affinity Mapping
I usually took on the role of facilitator, guiding discussions. Back then, we were dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. I think that digitizing post-its would enhance our online discussions, so I took the initiative to upload our raw data to Miro and encouraged the team to join in this work.
This research process focuses on effectively analyzing qualitative data, and I believe it is very suitable for dissecting vague problems like our original question and finding more precise directions.
Insights
Key Insights: importance of social support
Based on the user research and the persona, I was able to summarize the following key insights.
Lack of Connection with Experienced People
Our users feel that current solutions that we talk before are not very impactful. When attending career talks, there is no way to directly ask all questions to those sharing their experiences or knowledge, and the information is often not personalized.
Desire for Social Recognition
Sense of achievement from society help students discover their interests. They aspire to have careers that are not only interesting to them but also be commended by society.
More community support
Interacting with peers can help them better understand their own traits and the roles they play in a team. More importantly, the support of friends and communities that gives them the courage to step out of their comfort zones and explore more opportunities.
It's not hard to see that these needs and desires are related to society and interpersonal relationships. In addition, I was surprised that most interviewees did not face challenges with learning resources, which may be a characteristic of this generation. After thinking, we finally consolidated them into one question:
“How might we make college students feel more personal support from their community and society?”
Challenges
Tight Schedule and One UI Designer
We started to develop our solution based on that HMW. However, because this course emphasizes learning user research methods, we only had about three weeks for ideation, prototyping, and visualizing our design. Therefore, we just spent an afternoon in a workshop with a service design mentor to sprint and ideate our solution.
After continuous discussions and brain writing, we imagined a community platform that helps students form deeper connections with seniors who have more work experience. Since I was the only one with experience in UI design, I took charge of visual design and prototyping, while two engineers were responsible for implementation.
Before Design
Being Principled
Before I could jump into designing, it was important to define goals and design principles as a smaller set of guiding values so that the best decisions get made in a consistent manner. All rationales and key features should align with these principles.
On the other hand, because this is a brand new product from 0 to 0.5, I encouraged our team to view this design from an entrepreneurial perspective. That is, we first defined the product's value proposition, and then created a service blueprint to explore a preliminary product architecture and service process.
Principle #1
A delightful space that feels comforting
Principle #2
To become partners who respect each other
Principle #3
Value Co-creation: preserving and sharing
Solution
Introducing Guiding Angel
“Guiding Angel is a community platform where you can comfortably engage in deep conversations and feel partnership and companionship. We help college students find someone whom they can deeply discuss career and life experiences with.”
Delightful Browsing Experience
Browsing experience is what we care about the most. Through a vertical card set, you can browse through our recommended mentors or use the search tool. We emphasize that both successes and failures are valuable learning experiences. Therefore, our hashtags include many funny and unique terms. you can find mentors who can share similar feelings and experiences with you.
Respect both your and the mentor's time
We hope both mentors and mentees can gain valuable experience, so we've established various ways to help both parties get to know each other before starting the connection. Mentors provide their experiences and stories, and mentees have to send an invitation with rich content and wait for the mentor to accept.
Companionship: Get Ready for a coffee chat
By 1-on-1 chats, user and mentor can make sure if they’d like to have deeper interaction. We hope to provide users with a comfortable experience. And if you’re ready, just use our built-in schedule tool to send your coffee chat invitation!
Value Co-creation: Feedback and Sharing
After completing a coffee chat, you can provide feedback with the mentor and choose whether to share them in public. What's even more surprising is -- buy a coffee for your mentor! After a meeting, you can choose your preferred coffee as an appreciation.
The original prototype of Guiding Angel. I was responsible for the visual design and prototyping.
HOW WE GOT THERE
Iteration and Testing
As the only visual designer in the team, my primary task is to assist users in accessing the values we want to convey through a good interface, ultimately completing the mission. To achieve one of our most important principles: Create a space that feels comfortable and pleasant, I created several versions of wireframes for some pages, conducted user testing, and discussed with engineers.
Design for communication and Collaboration
Though design system is not much important for a small project, it truly helps me stay consistent and communicate with engineers and other members. Additionally, when creating this prototype, two other members expressed their interest in learning UI design and Figma. I believe that establishing a design system will also help them learn and understand some basics of UI design.
TAKEAWAY
What I Learned
My journey through this project provided several key insights, which made me a better designer.
Turn a huge and vague problem into a specific product
It's very difficult to find a solution to a vague problem directly; the best approach is to first clearly define the scope before design. We didn't do very well in deciding on the Target Audience, but this also taught me how to converge on the problem with the team.
Handoffs: Small iteration, quick conversation
I was fortunate to collaborate with engineers to bring my prototype to life. Due to the tight schedule, we closely collaborated with each other. I found small iterations and frequent discussions significantly facilitated the design handoffs.
Adopt different combos in different scenarios
In this project, I apply lots of methods on the user research. They’re great tools to help researchers conduct research, but designers should know when to use these tools, rather than merely replicating templates.
Helping others to be more engaged and involved in the design process
Well, originally, I am good at teamwork and communication, but I don’t quite understand why I aced it. This journey has deepened my understanding of how to become an influential designer within a team. Guiding and proactively sharing are among my key approaches.