Overview
Six week project focused on reseach, swift design, and user testing a new product concept.
Services
Research
Product Strategy
My Role
Program Leader
Product Strategist
KPMG—
2015
Six week project focused on reseach, swift design, and user testing a new product concept.
Services
Research
Product Strategy
My Role
Program Leader
Product Strategist
KPMG—
2015
Think back to your first day of college, new place, new people, in-depth classes, assignments, term papers not to mention a whole new culture to understand. KPMG, in collaboration with the Education Advisory Board set out to see if technology could help transition students gracefully through the first year of college.
Research + Strategy
Exploring how high school seniors become college students
Method
Conducted 37 one-on-one interviews with first-year college students at 3 universities. Analyze secondary demographic research from the Education Advisory Board to align insights from qualitative insights.
Hypotheses
- The first-year student feel a higher amount of pressure to perform academically
- New students find it challenging to balance class assignments and campus life.
- Students want to develop personal connections quickly.
- Students will need a robust social network to be successful
- Technology can ease the transition and weight of being a new student.
- First-year students' attention spans are impacted by unplanned events such as campus experiences, social outings, class changes, and lab-times.
Research + Strategy
Insights from the research
Based on the conducted research, our team defined approximately sixteen unique student persona types that exist within a new college student modality. While most could be impacted by a digital experience, our team focused on two distinct archetypes that shared a commonality with most of the types defined.
Qué Sarah—
A serious student but not profoundly invested in the school. She sits near that back of the class and rarely speaks up. She has made no effort to let her professors get to know her.
Motivational traits
Feels outside of academic life
Need to perform
Driven by positive reinforcements
Experience needs
Academic life education tools
Tools to manage assignments
Ability to meet and connect with others
The Butterfly—
She’s very popular. She’s a decent student but hasn’t yet figured out what she wants to do after college.
Motivational traits
Sense of belonging
Driven by reputation
Seeks identity through social interaction
Experience needs
Social networking and communication
Scheduling and time management
Prods and reminders
Creating a path for growth
Based on the research we created a persona progression plan charting the happy path of a persona’s movement through their motivational traits based on two primary dimensions: a sense of purpose and how they respond to unplanned events such as class assignments, campus activities, exams, and social engagements.
Prototype + User Test
Insights to Insights
Once we had a clear understanding of the motivations, engagement tactics and experience needs of the users we collaborated with the Education Advisory Board to define a high-level application happy path that could be tested with users to gather initial insights.
Our team created five options that tested interaction friction, speed-to-value, and overall usefulness.
Outcome
Time Management as core feature
As the dust settled on the research and user testing, it became clear that the primary feature arc of any experience would need to be time management tools for classes and assignments. Armed with this vital insight, the Education Advisory Board was able to go on to build a digital experience that would differentiate from market competitors and provide value to students.