Project Overview

Colleges and universities are places were individuals can learn new things, contribute to research, and prepare for professional careers. But as the number of post-secondary students graduating increases every year, so does the number of entry-level workers into the job market! Many university students desire to improve and maximize their portfolio because of this, and work on technical passion projects on their own time. However, networking and connecting with other students who want to collaborate can be extremely difficult, whether it be through one's own social circle, trying to find people online, or attending new networking events. 

Me and my team were interested in whether such collaborative hardships existed within undergraduates, and if so, if there was a way to provide a smoother experience for students. In the project, my work focused on wireframing, designing and implementing the UI, and evaluating the application through cognitive walkthroughs, interviews, and usability testing.

Experimental Conditions

UBConnect gives users the ability to facilitate project-group creation through two ways: finding other collaborators for a project, and finding an already existing project that one might be interested in. We conceptualized two competing organizational designs for these search pages, and asked participants to perform specified tasks on them to evaluate which design participants found most helpful. We used multiple methods of data collection to triangulate our data, to make sure our findings were valid and comprehensive: 

• Quantitative calculations (task completion time and number of clicks), to see how participant usage of the interface designs differed

• A System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire survey, asking participants to rate how usable they deemed each interface after completing a given task

• Qualitative 'think-aloud' comments made by participants, to provide thought-processes that could not be obtained through the previous methods

Our Findings

• Participants consistently rated the 'preset categories' interface higher on the SUS survey when looking for both a project and collaborator, with results for projects being significant (p < 0.05)

• All participants attempted to use the prototyped filter to some degree during their given task, suggesting that  filtering was a preferred method of search.

• A majority of participants stated they did not experience major differences between the interface designs (preset vs. no preset), or didn't realize they were different at all. This is supported through our collected quantitative data, where there was no significant differences for task completion time or the number of clicks across the interface designs.

Challenges We Faced

Because of the limited timeframe, scope, and resources of this project, the size of our participant pool was small, and the interviews and experiments were conducted online. Recruiting participants was challenging, as we only had the capability to recruit through convenience sampling. Thus, difficulty finding participants for both our field study and our usability testing, and figuring out scheduling across the participants and research team was difficult.

Another challenge we faced was brainstorming impactful solutions, particularly regarding the 'scannability' (how easily users can quickly see content) of our designs. We wanted to create a design that provided enough information for users to make quick decisions, while avoiding a cluttered interface. However, we realized that listing all the things a collaborator may have or that a project may need, was unfeasible on the search pages. This led to us to create a filter function, a 'skills importance level' feature, and a 'group size' feature that some participants stated were ultimately confusing and not very clear.