Innovatemap Project
Background
InnovateMap is a design firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana, which specializes in the fields of user & market research, branding, marketing, and user experience design. For this project, InnovateMap challenged my team in the Purdue UX program to create experience which would allow resident assistants (RAs) to communicate in an easy way with residents at a university residence hall.
My Contributions
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Aided in research by obtaining secondary sources, conducting interviews with RAs, and helping create a competitive analysis.
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Re-designed and created high-fidelity prototypes for Slack’s file management page to allow residence hall staff to keep their hall-related files on their primary mode of communication for their job.
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Helped create the user story and presented it to our stakeholders.
Deliverables
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A research report which explains the methods by which we conducted our interviews, co-design, testing, and other research.
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A user story which goes into detail about the manner in which an RA might access his residence hall’s communication channels and use it effectively.
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High fidelity prototypes which demonstrate the new features informed by previous research and user testing.
Research
After conducting primary and secondary research, we were made aware of the multiple areas in which the current RA communication ecosystem could be improved, what type of facilitation led to community building, and what RAs currently used for their communication. We ultimately decided that the best approach to solving existing issues would be creating a better user experience on an existing communication platform, namely Slack.
We also hosted a co-design session, in which we invited some RAs to generate ideas and designs themselves to assist in our research. A general insight gained from this activity was that the current communication systems had many issues for both the RAs and residents, most of which could be addressed with the addition of new features not unfamiliar to some competitors of Slack.
Final Designs
Our research and many iterations of sketches & prototypes led to our final designs. They are re-designs of existing pages or completely new features added according to the needs of the RAs.
File Management.
The updated files page acts in a similar manner to traditional file hosting services, which eliminates the need to use methods such as Brightspace, OneDrive, or the computer’s hard drive to store residence hall related files. Instead, their files are hosted directly on their mode of communication for the hall. A feature we later added was the ability to star folders, which allowed RAs to find frequently opened files quickly, such as duty schedules.
Calendar Integration.
From our competitive analysis and co-design workshops, we discovered that an addition of a calendar feature would be useful for the efficiency of RAs to plan and keep track of their RA duties.
Events.
We discovered from our co-design that RAs put effort into creating bulletin boards for announcements, only for them to be ignored by the residents. To make such announcements more visible, we thought of ways to allow RAs to advertise events so that more residents could be aware of them and thus better participate in events.
Chat Moderation.
RAs typically have to deal with unwanted messages on GroupMe, which does not allow for much moderation. Slack has better features implemented to moderate inappropriate messages, though it is restricted to the workspace owner. Our new design allows for the workspace owner to appoint certain people (in this case, RAs) to be able to delete unwanted messages.
