GRAD n GO.
project at a glance.
Design Type
Service Experience
Team Size
4
Duration
10 weeks
Process
Iterative
Tools Used
Adobe Illustrator, Wix
Methods Used
Service Walkthrough, Affinity Diagramming, Survey, Interviews, Stories, Scenarios
Design Opportunity.
Exploring a new country is very hard especially for students who go to a new country for studies and are cost conscious. Drawing from our experiences as first timers in the United States, we found an opportunity in redesigning an experience for Indian graduate students coming to the United States for the first time to study.
INvestigate.
A questionnaire consisting of 14 questions was sent out to people. It revolved around the problems people may have encountered, why they thought these were important, and what would they have done if they could have lived the experience differently. This gave us insights into the immediate needs of such a person.
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Affinity Diagramming process helped us to highlight the problems students faced. We identified themes around Communication: No immediate communication, absence of SIM cards & WiFi. Food: Not able to understand where to get food, also facing difficulties in what food to get. Finance: How to open a bank account, what documents are needed, money transfer issues.Transportation: No clue about transportation from the airport, unable to pay for Uber/Taxi. Lack of information: Where to get groceries, where to go for information, how to get to places etc. Housing: Skeptical about signing lease from back home, stranded when they landed here due to no accommodation. Sense of belonging and community: Difficulty in being a cultural fit.
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IDEATE.
Ideation process that we undertook welcomed all ideas without bias. We noted around 22 ideas for further evaluation in our first step of the process.
To narrow these 22 ideas to one single idea which had a consensus from all team members, we used the method of storytelling where the ideas were presented in the form of a story from one member and the rest of the team members evaluated and made notes. Each story was given a score from 1 to 10. Ideas with high scores were retained and the rest were discarded. Our final idea involved creating a website as a means to provide/initiate the services students seek. We scoped our project around services related to food, communication and transport for the first 48 after upon arrival to the United States.
Personae.
We created two personae to visualize scenarios from a third party perspective.
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Lean Canvas.
We created Lean Canvas to give a quick glance on the various components of our service.
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Customer Journey Mapping.
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Prototype.
A website using Wix was created to kick off the service experience (Grad n Go). Once the test users selected the package they were interested in, they were taken to the site where Service Walkthrough was set up. At the University of Washington Link station, Seattle, we set up various touchpoints a user can interact with. The link station was chosen to simulate an experience as close to an airport. We recruited 3 test users who each chose a different package of service and went through the simulated experience.