NCTU+
Responsibility
Research, Design, Test, Management
Role
UX Team Lead
Team
NCTU+ UX Team
Period
2017.9 - 2018.5
OVERVIEW
OVERVIEW
UX Leadership
I built the UX Team and promoted the UX culture within the organization. At the same time, in addition to teaching the group members, I also guided them to carry out the sub-work of the project alone.
On the other hand, the waterfall process we used from the beginning gradually turned to lean UX, trying to work more effectively with the development team to make the design work.
Courses' Timetable Arrangement Design
Arranging courses' timetable has always been the students' biggest challenge at the beginning of every semester. We have conducted research and find that people will search for courses' reviews in the various channel, finding the criteria of graduation in many places including the website or office of their department. Our challenge is to integrate the massive information into our website, easing the pain of finding and searching the pieces. At the same time, we want to enrich the content of the review on our website, which also raises the issue of how to motivate users to post their review.
INTRODUCTION
NCTU+ is a life information website designed for students in National Chiao Tung University. It currently has four main functions: course scheduling, course review, second-hand book transactions, and event promotions.
At the very beginning, the organization was divided into three departments: front-end development, back-end development, and marketing. Since the newly-received organization leader in 2017 learned the importance of UX, I was appointed to establish the UX department in this organization.
After the UX team was formed, I faced several problems: Most people in the organization didn't understand the value of UX, team members never knew what UX was, and the organization had never implemented a design-driven product development process. Therefore, I have to find ways to develop the UX expertise of the team within a year, and let UX truly integrate into the organization.
The design project I am responsible for is the improvement of the course pre-arrangement function. Course scheduling is an information service that college students attach great importance to. The website that was provided by the school system in the past has been unable to meet the current students’ habits and behavior patterns after the passage of time. Therefore, in this project, our task is to design and develop a course scheduling function that can benefit all of the NCTU students.
CHALLENGE
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Doing this project is not my teammates' primary job, it's hard to have them spend extra time doing this.
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Members in NCTU+ have little or don't have knowledge in UX, I need to invest a lot of time on instruction and promoting UX.
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There are various students in NCTU, reaching all of the kind of them is difficult and also we have limited resources.
DESIGN RESEARCH
Contextual Inquiry
Our first iteration focuses on the undergraduates. We recruited 10 undergraduates as our interviewees, having the experience in scheduling courses from different departments, sexes, and ages. After the affinity analysis, we found the theme that students talking about:
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Need additional information to help them make decision
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The teaching style and scoring influence a lot
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Interest plays a important role in choosing general education courses
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There is few trustworthy information online
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Some parts of the interface could be improved
Consolidated Sequence Model
We identified the activity flow of each user and consolidated them to extract the high level abstract steps and activities.We finally consolidated 10 flows into 3, and had these behavior flow become the backbones of our personas.
Persona Spectrum
We extracted several attributes we thought that affect the behavior the most. We recorded those attributes when we conducted the interviews, also we observed some of them were mentioned many times from the affinity wall. We label our users on each dimension, and map out 3 primary personas.
Users' Needs Statement
Sharon: Positive upward
For Sharon, learning things is the most important, but it is best if she can get high scores at the same time. She is very concerned about what she can do in the future, and she hopes to prepare for the future by learning more courses in different departments. Therefore, the problem she encountered was that when she wanted to take an extracurricular course, she could only judge what course might help her through the curriculum. Ptt is difficult for her, and the information on NCTU+ is not complete enough. It is difficult to get relevant information through friends who know their own department.
So for Sharon, she needs to find credible and sufficient information to help her understand the value of the course in the future of career development, because she needs to find her own position in the future and become a useful person.
Staphie: Relationship-driven
Staphie is a very emotional person, on the one hand is also accustomed to the established learning style. She always wants to find friends to accompany her to take classes, and she will also find out if the teacher she likes has other courses. If a friend asks her to take classes, she will also consider it. Staphie relies heavily on the evaluation of the course and the teacher at PTT. Her problem is that she is very afraid of a course becoming a bomb, so when a teacher has a little review, she is less willing to take risks.
So for Staphie, she needs more advice from the community she is in to help explore new areas of knowledge because she is a person who needs a sense of stability.
Wade: Cope with ease
Wade only looks at classes that are easy to pass, so he always has a combination of courses, but the course that suits his interests is the one he wants to choose. He will refer to a variety of types of information, such as asking the elder sister's experience, syllabus, PTT, the number of students in the school system, who is taking courses, usually by asking in person, if he can't get the information, he can only go to the first lesson. Due to his personality, Wade always thinks about which courses to choose after the start of course selection, which makes his time of thinking shorter than others. As a result, too many combinations of courses cause him to always struggle.
So for Wade, he needs an objective and tailor-made course advice, and he has the ability to grasp the source of information so that he can adjust his strategy at any time because he is a casual but not casual person.
DESIGN
Our design went through brainstorming, storyboard, user flow, paper prototyping, testing, UI guideline writing, but the project ended up on hold. After a period of time, I went back to discuss with the team members why this situation was formed. We find that the development team does not have enough human resources to implement our design. This is a revelation for us: knowing that the design is feasible is not enough, we must make the design scale to meet the organizational resource constraints so that we have the opportunity to deliver to the user.
So for UX Team, the goal of design must be more clear, and trying to solve only one important problem at a time will be the principle that must be followed in the future.
CULTURE SHAPE
In addition to promoting the positive impact of user-centered design in every meeting, I made the product development process change to make the use of our resources under organizational limitation. From 2016 to 2017, the entire NCTU+ was compiled by more than 30 people, of which the development team accounted for the majority, but the project's landing efficiency was extremely poor.
As the person in charge of the design team, I care that the design output must be truly executed to affect the user. However, we found that because of the new recruits each year, and the new people's development ability is relatively weak, or even not at all, in the absence of proper management, the project schedule often stagnates and delays the schedule.
The original project development process was carried out on a project-oriented basis. A team consists of several departments in the design, development and marketing departments, and the team is responsible for a project, and the team develops the waterfall flow of design, development and marketing.
In order to speed up the delivery and increase the number of iterations, we introduced the perspective of Lean UX, and unified the project leader as the person in charge of NCTU+, which is to reposition Project Manager as Product Owner.
In the team preparation, the development team will be composed in advance, each team can choose the project of interest to develop; and the design and marketing department are each integrated into a single team, responsible for the design and marketing of all projects. In summary, the original project-oriented development process was changed to a team orientation. Each of the development teams is equipped with a senior developer to plan development progress and leadership, so the problems of new members are resolved.
In the development process, the result that the design team submitted to the development team for the first time is wireframe. After entering the development stage, the visual and interactive design is carried out, and after the staged development results are obtained, the test is performed, and finally the test result is used. An iteration to make design improvements.
To sum up, after the implementation of this system in the second half of the semester, the number of projects that delivered was three times that of the previous semester, and the skills of the members also increased.
TEAM RECRUITMENT & TRAINING
In order to find a suitable newcomer to continue to operate UX Team, I am also responsible for planning recruitment. We want to find new members with research or design potential, as well as teamwork and the ability to perform tasks on their own.
Before the interview, I sent research and design challenges to each applicant and asked them to introduce their teamwork experience. The contents are as follows:
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Please introduce yourself within 200 words, including your name, background, and why you are interested in UX. If you have participated in any activities or projects related to UX, UI, service design, design thinking, digital marketing, product operations and planning, please briefly describe the background and the role you are in.
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NCTU+ hopes to redesign the functions and pages of second-hand book auctions, and expand the new and old books to new and second-hand books. Our target group is now a freshman to senior year college student. Please use the "need to find the needs of college students to buy books on the Internet platform" for research purposes, to help carry out research, if you have any needs, you can make your own assumptions. Complete the following three points:
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Briefly describe your research process (within A4/PPT)
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Organize and analyze at least three discoveries that you find interesting
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Based on your findings, propose possible future design directions for NCTU+ book trading platform
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Find a website you like best and choose one of the most important features to complete the following two points:
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Use the page image to describe the relationship between the usage process and the page, including the interaction mode between pages and the hierarchical relationship between the pages.
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Find out what you think is good and bad, describe the reason and suggest improvements.
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We also planned some questions that can be asked during the interview based on this challenge:In summary, the NCTU+ has a total of 67 candidates, and 12 of them have completed the UX Team challenge. For us, the degree of completion of the work is not the most important point. What we pay more attention to is whether the logic of the discussion is rigorous, which is a very important ability for research or design.
In order to give the members who passed the interview basic UX concepts and capabilities, I planned a one-week UX training. The schedule is as follows:
The purpose of this training is to let everyone experience the design process, and understand what each activity means in the process. At the same time, through my guidance, let everyone know the space and direction of their progress, and let the team members become familiar with each other. At the end of the training, I also invited the domestic HCI professor to be the reviewer of the design work, and invited the UI design instructor to teach the basic concepts of UI design and how design team cooperates with the development team.
My teaching method is that lectures and workshops are interlaced. The themes derive from NCTU+'s positioning “NCTU Smart Campus System”. We research and design three topics of NCTU's unique transportation, diet and learning community, and cooperates with the development and marketing team.
Summary
In summary, I built the UX Team in this organization, and in it created an organizational culture with user-centric thinking, and let these influential things continue to happen. During my tenure, there was no way to implement the design because of various factors, but I believe that after a period of time, the team will stabilize and UX will begin to change our campus.