Google Design Exercise

Prompt

Design an experience for new students to browse, search, and propose new student organizations. Provide your overall process, a wireframe flow, and one to two screens at higher fidelity.

Initial Thoughts

First of all, I decided to focus my design on college students given the sheer number of student organizations in universities and hence the much greater chance for confusion and problems when navigating such a complex system.

In addition, while the primary user group is new students, I made sure that all designs would work for any college students who want to learn more about the student organizations at their schools as well.

Last but not least, I began to break the issue at hand down to its root causes. More specifically, what are the problems, needs and goals for new students when it comes to looking for and proposing new student organizations? With this question in mind, I conducted my research.

Competitor Research

Currently, the online student organization list and annual activities fair are the 2 major options that offer students a comprehensive look at different student organizations. However, each comes with some significant shortcomings:

The online list:

• Not very accessible. For the 5 colleges I looked into, the list is all web-based and is buried so deep that not many students are actually aware of its existence.

• Hard to use and navigate. The list is long, usually with hundreds of entries, but only comes with very basic filtering options, if at all.

• Inconsistent. While the list often does provide pieces of helpful information, it is often not displayed consistently both across different colleges and even for different organizations within the same college.

Activities fair:

• Crowded and disorienting. It was generally reflected that activities fairs are too crowded to be explored properly. Based on swift and ill-considered judgments, students usually ended up signing up for clubs they don’t really want to join which they eventually quit anyway.

• Too many to finish. Activities fair usually occupies huge physical spaces but without clear indication of topics/themes. Students simply aren’t sure if they have explored every option they think they would be interested in.

• Intimidating. Many new students feel they are ‘supposed to go in with a plan’ and would be quite disconcerted otherwise.

Hence, moving forward, I decided that for any alternative designs to outperform the currently available options, they should, at a minimum, be as comprehensive, more consistent, and dead simple to use and navigate.

Stakeholder Interviews

Stakeholder 1: New Students

I talked with 3 freshmen, 1 sophomore and 1 senior at Stanford to more comprehensively capture the problems, needs and goals for new students. A few key quotes and takeaways include:

“It’s hard to identify the clubs that I think I will be interested in.”

“My interest just dwindled over time as I felt some activities I previously enjoyed have turned into a responsibility.”

“I came in with no idea which organization I want to join. But I guess if you present me with a couple of options, I could tell you which ones I’m interested in.”

Mis-alignment of interest. New students are having a hard time aligning their interests with the student organizations that they either intend to join or have already joined.

“As a sophomore I just don’t feel like joining new clubs. I mean, in the club, everyone probably already knows one another very well. I wouldn’t feel I belong there.”

“I was almost thrown into the first club event. There was no orientation and I didn’t know anyone at the organization. It was quite uncomfortable.”

“I quit because I don’t feel I was a valued member anymore.”

No sense of belonging. Many students quit a student organization or didn’t join at all because they don’t feel they belong there.

“I left because I felt burnt out. I didn’t expect the club activities would take me so much time. I had to quit.”

“I haven’t joined any student organizations because I’m usually on a heavy workload and I don’t know how much time the clubs are gonna take.”

No good estimation of time commitment. Students simply don’t have good measurements of how much time the student organizations would take.

Stakeholder 2: Student Organization Administrator

I also talked with an ex-President of a now discontinued club and the Associate Director of Student Activities and Leadership at Stanford to better understand the current situation from the perspective of the administrator. There were 2 key learning points:

• Because there exists so many student organizations, there are always some that are struggling with lack of exposure and hence a decrease in membership.

• The lack of interest in subsequent student cohort is another important reason why some student organizations gradually became understaffed and eventually disappeared.

Ideate & Prototype

Therefore, to solve the problem, I had 3 objectives in mind for my design:

1. A simple and easy-to-use structure that fits the user journey of new students

2. Better alignment between student organizations and new students’ actual interests and preferences (e.g. how much time students are willing to spend)

3. Creation of stronger sense of belonging when new students are looking for student organizations to join

I started by brainstorming and establishing the features my app should have. I then went on to explore the user flow through paper sketches. And the final result, after several rounds of iterations, is as shown below:

At this point, I felt confident to start prototyping at higher fidelity. Therefore, I moved to Sketch and arrived at the final wireframe flow after several rounds of iteration:

As an overview, to help achieve Objective #1, I opted for a bottom navigation with 3 options with each corresponding to 1 touchpoint in the user journey of a new student:

• Explore. This is the starting point for new students to look for student organizations that best align with their interests and preferences.

• Propose. This tab corresponds to the point when new students didn’t find any students organizations that interest them in the ‘Explore’ phase and would like to propose one on their own. This acts as a safety net for Objective #2.

• Profile. Last but not least, this is the phase where students have already decided on which student organizations to join. This view allows students to check out upcoming club activities for both their ‘Favorite’ clubs and the ones they are already a member of and therefore helps facilitate student’s transition from a spectator to a club member.

I will delve into 3 key user flows in greater details, starting with the onboarding sequence.

Onboarding

The onboarding experience begins with users signing in with their school emails. This step both verifies user’s identity as a college student and helps personalize the app according to the college the student attends.

The welcome screen greets the user by his/her name and explains the benefit of filling out the questionnaire which helps indirectly to achieve Objective #2. It features the entry point to the questionnaire together with either the app’s icon or a relevant illustration to reinforce branding and add visual delight. It also offers the option to skip the questionnaire for those who already know what they are interested in.

The questionnaire is short and sweet with 1 question per screen. Each question is in multiple-choice format. Choices for certain questions are accompanied by illustrations/images to provide context. The questionnaire directly helps achieve Objective #2 by gauging new students’ interests and preferences and therefore helping the app to recommend the most suitable student organizations.

If the user presses the ‘Maybe Later’ button on the welcome screen, the app skips the questionnaire and go to the homepage. But there will be an inline card that remains available on the homepage for the user to complete the questionnaire at any other time the user desires.

Explore

After user fills out the questionnaire, the top of the homepage is updated with a ‘Recommended For You’ section to give user clear and easy access to the suggested organizations.

This is followed by a comprehensive list of student organizations. The ‘Search’ functionality is available at the top and there are 2 filter options, namely topic and time commitment which, as established during user research, are the 2 most important aspects new students are concerned about. These 2 pieces of key information are available on every card as well. And user can easily shortlist a club as his/her ‘Favorites’ (which is available on the ‘Profile’ page) by pressing the heart icon.

User goes into the detail screen after pressing on any student organization cards. All key information are displayed above the fold, including club photos, club name, topic, time commitment required, key action buttons and a brief description of the club.

The ‘Sign-up’ button provides new students an easy and one-click access to signing up for the club. The ‘Invite’ button is designed with Objective #3 in mind. During research, it was discovered that students are less likely to leave a club if they already had friends there. Therefore, to help create the sense of belonging, new students could share the club’s detail page with their friends through the ‘Invite’ button and invite them to join together.

The ‘Members’ section primarily helps address Objective #3. ‘Number of members’ helps users get a sense of the scale of the organization. The message from the President or other current members of the club help add a humanizing touch to the club. And the ‘See all members’ option offers users the possibility to check out who’s already in the club and if there are any familiar faces. It’s like a mini-orientation and get-to-know-each-other session but one that happens before making a commitment to join a club. And if the new student has any questions, he/she can always directly contact the organization through one of the methods displayed in the ‘Contacts’ section.

Last but not least, the ‘Upcoming’ section displays the most recent club events to further reduce the friction of getting new students onboard.

I won’t go into the details of the photo viewer and search screen as they are rather standard and work pretty much the same across other apps.

Propose

Last but not least, I would like to talk about the ‘Propose’ feature. Instead of having to go through the elaborate process of starting a new student organization which is both impractical and too complicated for new students, I interpreted and decided that the ‘Propose’ feature would allow new students to quickly indicate their interests by filling out a short form. On the back-end, when there are enough responses, NLP algorithms can be applied on students’ responses to identify students with common interests and connect them together via emails.

The ‘Propose’ feature can be accessed either from the bottom navigation or from a snackbar that automatically pops up after the student has checked out, say, 5 student organizations but favorited/signed up for none.

High Fidelity

Based on the wireframes, I prototyped the homepage and the detail screen to explore how the key screens in a final product would look and feel like.

I made sure the screens follow the Material Design Guidelines that not only ensures consistency with other Google products but also helps achieve Objective #1. The club photos are at the front and center to provide a more visual and tangible representation of the club beyond text descriptions which hopefully helps improve the clickthrough rate.

Google Integration

I thought it could be interesting to further explore how the app could better take advantage of other Google services and integrate into the rest of the Google ecosystem.

This app is built assuming Google has access to student organization information at most US colleges and universities. If that’s the case, collaboration between clubs from different schools would be much easier. For example, as an extended feature on the app, Google could help organize nationwide tournaments between clubs of pretty much any topic, be it robotics, debate or sports. In addition, if certain clubs are not doing great at some colleges, Google could potentially help facilitate information sharing from clubs of similar topics at other schools that are performing well to help the underperforming clubs do better.

In addition, the app could also benefit from Google’s VR technology to provide a more immersive experience. For example, on the ‘detail’ screen, in addition to the photos available at the top, there could also be a virtual walk-around option, facilitated by a Cardboard or Daydream View, that provides new students virtual tours customized to each club - be it a ride in a solar car or experiencing a Taiko performance first-hand.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!