GenAlly
First-generation students face a unique set of challenges in college as they forge their way through unknown academic territory. GenAlly is a high-fidelity app prototype that aims to assist these students in navigating the challenges of higher education by bringing them together. This project was completed as my work for Kennesaw State University’s Interaction Design 1 course.
Objective:
My team and I wanted to create a space where first-generation students can support one another through the challenges of higher education by sharing resources and their common experiences.
App Idea:
GenAlly is a forum-style app designed to facilitate conversations between first-generation student mentors and mentees.
Team Size:
4
Duration:
12 Weeks
Approach:
Goal-Directed Design
Role:
Researcher, Interviewer, Prototyper
Tools:
Figma and Figjam
Approach
Created by Alan Cooper, Goal-Directed Design (GDD) focuses on creating well-designed, easily usable products grounded in user feedback. This is done through several iterative phases, which include research, modeling, requirements, framework, refinement, and support. Throughout the GDD method, designers aim to bring user research and feedback into the entire design process to create products that have user needs at the forefront.
Research Phase
In the research phase, my team and I completed a Kickoff Meeting worksheet, discussed relevant peer-reviewed literature, completed a competitive audit, and interviewed a Subject Matter Expert. Because my team and I had no actual stakeholders, we completed a Kickoff Meeting worksheet which put us in the mindset of theoretical stakeholders and sharpened our view of the app’s audience, purpose, and niche.
Literature Review
In our examination of peer-reviewed literature about first-generation students, my team and I saw repeatedly that they are faced with a unique set of issues, but familial and institutional support has a significant effect on increasing the odds of first-generation student success. Because our app centers on connection between peers, we focused specifically on the way that having a mentor increases the chances of graduation
Key Insights
- Having a mentor greatly increases a first-generation student’s chances of college graduation.
- First-generation students are not homogenous and factors ranging from gender, and health status to parental occupation affect one’s likelihood of college graduation. Fostering awareness around these differences and embracing diversity allows productive discussions to take place.
- While task mastery in a higher education space is important for first-generation students, it is not more strongly correlated with GPA and the intent to re-enroll than for non-first-gen students. Other factors such as feelings of belonging may likely have a greater effect on continued enrollment.
- First-generation students face, on average, greater chances in the transition from high school to college and are more likely to discontinue once they have begun college than students with a familial background of college education.
- The gap in achievement between first-generation and non-first-generation students persists, but addressing the psychological, familial, and institutional factors of first-generation students’ experiences can help to decrease the difference.
Competitive Audit
Through the competitive audit, my team and I found that there was no existing active app in the Apple app store specifically for first-generation student connection and support. While Reddit’s forum-style layout is designed to facilitate discussion, the first-generation student subreddit was very small.
My team and I also had concerns about how the option to remain anonymous could foster inappropriate conduct. LinkenIn’s profile customization options are effective in showcasing interests and experiences, but the formal atmosphere and emphasis on employment does not create an atmosphere of conversation and connection for college students.
Subject Matter Expert Interview
Interviewing a Subject Matter Expert (SME) was not required, but my team and I contacted Chelsea Craig, the author of a thesis that examines mentoring’s effectiveness on the sense of belonging and self-efficacy in first-generation students. As mentoring’s positive effects stood out through the literature we reviewed, we wanted the chance to speak to someone who has experience creating a mentorship program.
Key Insights
- The definition of first gen is evolving and the category has a wide demographic spread
- Focus on creating chances for thematic connections rather than thematic groupings to allow students to determine which categories they participate in
- Peer mentors have the benefit of modeling for mentees, which illuminates commonalities between the mentor and mentee
- Clear expectations about the roles of mentors are essential to maintaining a consistently helpful mentorship program
User Interviews
My team and I spoke to five first-generation students in person, four of whom are currently in college pursuing an undergraduate degree and one who has graduated. After each interview, we recorded our thoughts individually and reviewed them as a team to find common themes with the use of affinity mapping.
Due to time constraints, we were not able to interview students outside of Kennesaw State University. With this in mind, we focused on looking beyond institutional support specific to KSU and instead centered on gaining an understanding of their broader college experience.
Key Insights
- Perceived sense of belonging on campus is correlated with involvement in university groups or organizations
- Advisors and organizationally appointed mentors are helpful figures for some and do not play an active role or provide misinformation to others
- Peer mentoring is key for those who did not find advisors helpful
- Networking for internships and future careers is primarily done in person
Modeling Phase
To organize the information from our interviews into simplified visual patterns, my team and I mapped our interview participants onto spectrums of behaviors and traits we identified as relevant to the first-generation college experience from our interviews. This process helped us to see the dominant patterns which we then based our persona on. The data showed a distinct theme among the participants: a majority (3) reported high involvement in university-sponsored activities, strong involvement with a mentor, and a strong sense of belonging on campus.
Following this process, we wrote key characteristics and end goals which synthesized information from the behavior spectrums and key quotes from the interviews. These characteristics and end goals were then used to define our project’s persona.
Persona
Personas are evidence-based models used to conduct scenario-based research with a focus on a specific group of users. Because personas are synthesized directly from patterns identified in user research, they allow design teams to clearly see user behaviors, priorities, needs, and goals as the team moves forward. In a scenario with stakeholders, presenting personas can unify a team around a central set of needs and requirements as well as prevent self-referential design.
In many projects, there is a primary persona based on the dominant patterns found in user research as well as secondary persona(s) based on subordinate patterns. My team and I only created a primary persona because of the limited number of interviews we conducted, although there were suggestions of secondary patterns that we would have liked to explore given the time. To compensate for the lack of data, we focused later in our design process on making an interface that could be customized to the user’s position and interests.
Our persona is Evelyn Holmes, a first-generation student who works part-time and is an active participant in her college’s social life. When creating Evelyn Holmes, my team and I looked to the patterns established in the modeling phase, as well as specific quotes and experiences that stood out in the interviews to form a persona that would capture the goals and behaviors of our target users. From this, we made a persona who is career-oriented and actively works to establish professional relationships while in college. Despite this focus, our persona sometimes wishes she had a stronger network of first-generation students when she encounters college or major-specific questions that her advisor cannot help her with, a sentiment several of our interview participants expressed.
Frameworks Phase
My team and I referred to the design requirements created in the previous stage to make a low-fidelity wireframe. This wireframe consists of Key Path scenarios, which are the well-travelled paths of the app, typically activities done daily. We fleshed out the wireframe with Validation Scenarios, which include alternate paths for common actions, necessary but unusual actions, and edge-case actions. By plotting out these paths, we created the structure of the prototype overlaid with user journeys, so the design requirements established in the Requirements Phase are prioritized in the organization of the app.
After reviewing the organization of this wireframe, my team and I transitioned to working in Figma to create a high-fidelity prototype. This was the most time-intensive part of the project, as we worked to create a detailed prototype which would effectively demonstrate our ideas.
Refinement Phase
My team and I brought back two interview participants for usability testing. We asked the participants to complete a series of tasks where they navigated through and interacted with sections of the prototype. Participants gave feedback throughout the process which was ultimately helpful in identifying areas for improvement that my team and I overlooked. However, due to time constraints, the number of participants was not ideal, but my team and I focused on conducting in-depth usability tests to compensate.
Conclusion
The greatest challenge in this project was the limited number of user interviews. Given the chance to do the project over again, I would schedule at least double the time for user interviews and contact a more diverse pool of participants that includes multiple alums as well as first-generation students from different colleges. The information gained from the interviews we conducted was fundamental to the way our app evolved, but it was clear that there were relevant perspectives that we did not explore fully.
I would also approach my portion of the high-fidelity prototype work with greater organization from the beginning. As this was my first project, my Figma skills were not what they were of my more experienced teammates, and I struggled at first to maintain the high level of order that my they upheld. However, throughout the process, my teammates shared their Figma expertise with me and I was able to improve significantly. I feel confident that I will be a much stronger asset in the prototyping stage in future projects and look forward to using the skills that I learned.