Prime Digital Academy
Welcome Gift Redesign
Prime Digital Academy is an organization dedicated to providing software engineering and user experience design education. They offer immersive learning experiences curated to prepare individuals for successful careers in the tech industry. Their curriculum covers project-based learning, professional development, mentorship, and career support.
MY ROLE:
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Product Redesign
User Testing
Deliverables:
Product Pitch
METHODS:
Observational AEIOU Research
Research Interviews
Desirability Survey
Low-Fidelity Physical Prototyping
User Prototype Evaluations
Process Work:
Exploratory Research Report
Evaluation Plan
Project Background
Summary:
Prime Digital Academy is a school based in Minneapolis that offers on-campus, hybrid, and remote programs for full-stack engineering and user experience design students. Their courses are designed to be immersive and accelerated.
Prime is dedicated to providing a positive student experience, encouraging self-care, school/life balance, and support throughout their programs and beyond.
Prime approached me to develop a new solution for their current welcome gift for the full-stack students. The goal of the product redesign was to better meet the students’ values, needs, and pain points, while adhering to Prime’s values, mission and branding. I focused on the functionality, usability, and meaning of a proposed new product.
Problem: Redesign the Prime Digital Academy welcome gift with a solution that meets students’ desires, needs, goals, and values. Focusing on functionality, usability, and meaning.
Process: Working as a team during the initial user observations, we evaluated the current student experience with the classroom and interpersonal interactions (AEIOU observation framework). We then conducted user interviews to gain a deeper understanding into their current perception of the welcome gift and their physical, emotional, and mental experience as Prime students.
Findings: There was an opportunity to design a gift that would provide more emotional, mental, and physical support as well as increasing the product usability and functionality.
Solution: I conceptualized, evaluated, and prototyped a physical product that would better meet the students’ needs and desires. This culminated in a client product pitch presentation to key Prime Academy stakeholders.
The Problem
How can Prime’s gift address students’ needs to help them feel valued, welcome, professional, and supported from first impression through entirety of program?
Prime Digital Academy provides a welcome gift to its full-stack students when they start their program. The welcome gift consists of a t-shirt, a lanyard with a name-tag and access fob, and a pen. I was tasked with redesigning a welcome gift that feels meaningful and useful to the full-stack students and to better represent Prime’s values.
Full-stack students in Prime have signed up for an immersive and intensive educational program that requires immense amounts of focus and motivation. The students are very dedicated to their work - they want to succeed and produce high quality deliverables to help build their portfolio, coding skill sets, and professional development. Their high motivation was observed to come at an expense to their physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
The students are spending 40-80 hours per week sitting at their computer and do not have much capacity to focus on caring for themselves through healthy eating, exercise, and outside fulfillment. Prime Academy places high priority on valuing support for their students holistically throughout the program, and understands how demanding their immersive programs can be for students.
Prime Digital Academy’s Values
Understanding the Users
Exploratory Research Report:
Key Takeaways:
To understand the current student experience in their environment we performed observational AEIOU research. The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of what the students interacted with most, how did they interact with each other, and what aspects of their classroom environment appeared most crucial to their success and workflow.
Key AEIOU Observations:
Whiteboards were integral to their workflow. All of the whiteboard space was covered in their classrooms.
The cohort culture was highly focused on being supportive and encouraging with one another
Key items students were interacting with were: laptops, coffee mugs, water bottles, pens, notebooks
We needed to gain a deeper understanding of the students’ experience at Prime, so we conducted research interviews with a few of the full-stack students. A portion of the interview involved gaining insight into their perceptions of the current welcome gift.
Research Goals:
Uncover full-stack students’ feelings and expectations on their first day on campus
Understand how the full-stack students perceive the current welcome gift
Gain a deeper insight into the full-stack students’ physical, mental, and emotional experiences as Prime students.
I synthesized my findings into an exploratory research report. In this report I included project context and summary. I moved into explaining my methodology and summed up the key insights and themes that I noticed. An important aspect of this was detailing the full-stack students current perception of the welcome gift provided.
Full-stack students have high levels of engagement and motivation. Full-stack students are motivated, focused, and determined to get the most out of the program and product high quality deliverables.
Students struggle with self-care and a healthy school/life balance. All students interviewed mentioned how they have not been able to find a healthy balance between their coursework and their physical, emotional, and mental wellness.
Current welcome gift lacked meaning and long product-use life. The gift does not effectively address student pain points or needs for success during the program.
Solution
Design Concepts:
From my user research findings, I designed 3 new potential concepts that would better meet the student’s values, needs, and desires. With keeping the students’ physical, emotional, and mental needs in mind, I developed 3 new design concepts that would provide tools for organization, balance, and self-care.
(1) A personalized planner with an e-ink tablet integration, time-blocking scheduling pages, and self-care and gratitude tracking. (2) A card deck inspired by tarot/oracle cards with an integrated timer to help students balance focused work time with taking self-care breaks. (3) A professional ID badge with an integrated access key.
Desirability Evaluation:
I conducted a desirability survey via Google Forms to evaluate the level of interest in my 3 design concepts. 9 Students took the survey and ranked all three of my designs based on their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice product.
Low-Fidelity Physical Prototyping:
Desirability survey results. 9 students ranked their level of desirability of my 3 initial design concepts.
Based on the results from the desirability survey, I created a low-fidelity physical prototype of my personalized journal design at Leonardo’s Basement. I used this prototype to conduct user evaluations on the functionality, usability, and meaningfulness of the product.
Evaluation
User Evaluation Research:
Findings:
I conducted 3 user evaluation interviews both remote via Slack huddles and in-person. I had 3 main evaluations goals that I used to curate a series of questions incorporated into an evaluation script.
Evaluation Goals:
To better understand the level of desirability and meaning a user would gain from this product
Gain insights around how practical and useful a student would find this gift during their time studying at Prime.
Identify if the product is meeting the users’ needs and goals, and look for any pain points in the design.
My user research revealed that this product would be of great benefit to their time management, coursework, and contribute to a healthier balance in their school and life. The students were most excited about the e-ink capabilities.
“The e-ink aspect is invaluable. I would literally use this all the time to work out problems visually.”
They appreciated the idea of receiving a gift that has practical use, especially in terms of the intensive program. Many students already had their own methods of time management and organization. But all 3 were open to the idea of trying out this specific planner to see if the various pages could be adapted to their personal preferences. 2/3 students didn’t believe they would continue to use this product outside of their time at Prime Academy.
“I would definitely use the self-care reminders at first, but based on my current experience, I don’t think I would have continued to use that long-term.”
Delivery
Client Pitch:
I composed a 5-minute client pitch presentation accompanied by a slide deck and presented it to key stakeholders. I included the opportunity space, my proposed design, and my supporting research as to why my product redesign would address students’ needs and desires. I used powerful storytelling techniques including logos, pathos, and ethos.
Next Steps
Conduct further user research to gain a better understanding of what types of pages in a planner would yield the most usability for the students.
Iterate on the design and conduct more evaluations to see if the planner would bring value to the students.