My Role
UX Researcher
Product Designer
Research Paper Contributor
Research Team: Stage 1
Dr. David Lee
Dustin Palea
Ana Guo
Atira Nair
Ryan Anderson
Research Team: Stage 2
Dr. David Lee
Marissa Lewellen
Krupa Patel
Anthony Nechayev
Allison Truong
Atira Nair
Methods
User Interviews
Analytical Memos
Holistic Coding
Heuristic Evaluation
Usability Testing
The Challenge
Participating within research roles is a very noteworthy and productive way to gain experience within your field of interest. However, earning a spot and finding the right research groups is not always easy to navigate.
The Solution
The goal of this project was to a small group formation platform for students to find areas of research that best fit for them through talking to other people. Collectively hosts spaces for students to collaborate and meet regularly, whilst gaining more expertise within their field of research.
Collectively is a platform built by the Tech4good team at University of California, Santa Cruz. Headed by Dr. David Lee, this research lab primarily helps students research skills and goals in order to gain more experience and industry knowledge.
Background
Involvement and Project Roadmap
Research Stage 1: User Research and Analyzing Findings
This portion of the project involved conducting several user interviews to extract relevant information. We used memos as annotations of common threads that we found between interviews, this being for both our future designs and our ongoing research paper (that we are writing via Overleaf) about small group formations.
Product Design: Ideation, Wireframing, and Development
The design team was made of three people: myself, Ana Guo, and Atira Nair. Our design implementation was mainly derived from our findings within the earlier research stages. We used Figma to piece together numerous frames and iterations.
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Research Stage 2: Heuristic Evaluations & Violations
The second round of research involved assessing the product with a fresh set of eyes. We used the AEDP Heuristic Evaluation guide, along with the influence of Nielsen's heuristics in order to more closely look at the violations found within the platform. After we were able to put together a report of our findings, we presented it back to the design team and development team to help further this project.
This project is still ongoing and undergoing construction. We are currently writing the small group formation research paper that is based off of our research from Collectively.
