Parul Sharma

Team Lead and Designer @ Northeastern University

For a more personalized campus visit experience, LivCollege is a web application that pairs prospective college students with current college students that have similar interests and profiles. The B2B service works with university admissions offices, high school students, and college students to schedule and arrange campus visits and provide feedback.

The Challenge

As project lead, I managed the product by communicating directly with the client to elicit and solidify product requirements. Very early in the process, it was clear that the business requirements and business rules had not been solidified. How are hosts paid after a visit? How long are visits? What is the cancellation policy for a visit? On what criteria are prospective and current college students matched? These were some of the many questions that needed to be answered before we even started wireframing.

The "What"

Because these ambguities would result in gaping holes in the UX, the first major step was to sit down with the client and ask: "What does LivCollege do?" By using a simple requirement elictation exercise with a whiteboard and lots of sticky notes, we worked with the client to understand his vision, then strip down the full list of requirements only those that were needed for a minimum viable product.

Interviews and Personas

While the core functionality was outlined, we also needed to think about who would use the web app. LivCollege is designed for three very different users: A prospective college student, a college student for hosting visits, and university administration. Interviews with Northeastern University Admissions, Northeastern students, and high school students were conducted to understand and empathize at a deeper level. Personas were created to synthesize our findings. This revealed how different the motives and challenges for each type of LivCollege user was.

Rinse and Repeat

We went through many rounds of paper prototyping and wireframing before we finalized the UI and user flows. The biggest challenge in this phase was not designing different portals for the prospective student, host student, and University Administration, but the interactions between the user types. We gathered feedback from Northeastern University admissions and current college students on our initial wireframes and addressed their critiques in later iterations.

Hi-Fidelity Mockups

Final Outcomes

The requirements book documents all 64 use cases. The aim was to effectively communicate designs to product and web development teams. Each use case outlines preconditions, basic path, postconditions, variations of the basic path, and references to correlating hi-fidelity mockups and can be easily converted to agile sprint stories. From a web development perspective, creating pixel perfect is challenging, but the real complexity arises in keeping track of object states. The 'visit' object, for example, has a lifecycle made up of 7 states. State diagrams can help convey the states clearly and mitigate confusion.