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Team Members:

Sai Santosh Balusu (sbalusu): Master of Computer Science student

Amit Ghetiya (aghetiy): Master of Computer Science student

Wen-Han Hu (whu24): Master of Computer Science student

Sepide Saiedlue (ssaiedl): PhD Candidate in Design

Kartik Shah (kcshah): Master of Computer Science student

Nimisha Tripathi (ntripat): Master of Computer Science student

Introduction

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Stage 1 - Research

Current Problems.
Business Aspect: Long term goal.
Challenges

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College students devote a lot of time to get succeed at university, preparing for their careers, and building community network.
Ocean of resources but, not centralized.
Tedious and time consuming.

Traditional websites problems?

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Community: An area where students can connect with each other and share ideas & resources they’ve found.
Career: Tools to Identify career options and paths for reaching them.
Learning: Resources for learning, certification, for both current classes and analyst skill or knowledge a student may want to acquire.

Lenovo Student Support Modules

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Personal branding
Centralized system
Recommender system that will suggest courses, certificates, tutors, jobs based on the user activity.

Question: Why would people prefer to use this website?

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What can we do to include the features of both hard science and liberal art major students without making the application too complicated ?
What resources/contents should be included in each section (Community, Career path, Learning Resources) without overlapping with each other ?
How can we ensure that users will find the desired resources on this platform?
How can we encourage students to use this platform, share the information and collaborate with other students and shift from existing/similar platforms ?

Challenges

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Stage 2 - Generate

Interview with users
Variations of Sketches and Description

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1) What is your educational background?

2) What is the most useful feature of other website? And how that feature should improve?

3) Do you prefer to learn to online, apart from your regular coursework?

4) What platforms and what kind of information do you access for online learning?

5) How do you look for job opportunities?

6) How do you like to connect with recruiters or companies?

7) Do you wish there is a new way for you to showcase your work (Ex: Portfolio)?

8) Do you prefer to talk to friends/acquaintances online?

9) How comfortable are you with sharing your information on social media?

10) What feature do you want to have in the website apart from what we mentioned?

11) What other features in the website meet your needs? (after explanation of the product)

12) How long do you expect to spend time to find something on the website?

13) How would you like to get notified and for what section?

Interview questions

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Learning →

To discover the companies listed with advanced filtering
To get certification in a topic
To grow their network
Daily schedule and course schedule
News Notifications
Have a uniform platform
A communication platform for students where they join groups based on their interests
“Handshake” is quite close to the client expectation
To share some reviews of the companies
To access resources easily
To sync the community and learning components of the website
To provide a pleasant interface and organized information
To track progress of ongoing courses

Student Interview Answers

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Variations of Sketches and Description

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Stage 3 - Choose

Voting
Winning Pages
Storyboard

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Winning Pages

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Stage 4 - Prototype

Signup Page
Landing Page
Community Page
Learning Page
Career Page

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Prototype - Signup Page

Landing Page

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Prototype- Community Page

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Prototype- Learning Page

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Prototype- Career Page

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Stage 5 - Evaluation

Participants
Process
Finding

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Participants

Student 1 (Justin):

Graduate student at North Carolina State University
Majoring Computer Science
Male, Age 25

Student 2: (sepide)

Working Professional
Physics
Male, Age 32

Student 3: (Nimisha)

Working Professional
Computer Science Graduate
Female, Age 29

Student 4: (Amit)

Graduate Student at North Carolina State University
Majoring in Industrial Mechanical Engineering
Male, Age 25

Student 5: (Kartik)

Working Professional and studied at UMKC
Masters in Bioinformatics
Female, Age 27

Student 6: (Santosh)

Graduate Student at North Carolina State University
Majoring in Industrial Design

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Process

Setup:
We used Zoom to set up a 1-on-1 virtual meeting with participants and also group meetings.
Each participant accessed the prototype by the link as below:
Prototype: https://xd.adobe.com/view/df1017d6-ed92-4afc-4895-7fcc12176da7-a921/?fullscreen&hints=off
Tools: Zoom: Setting up meetings, Google Docs: record the user reaction.

Explain the Tasks:
Things not work on prototype:

The input boxes are not able to be typed.
Some components are able to expand or minimize on certain pages.
Some content may not show the details.

Tasks:

Proceed from Signup page to Landing Page
Find the expandable/minimizable components in Landing Page.
Find course details on the Learning Page.
Find job details on the Career Page.
Find invitations from others on the Connections Page.
From any of the pages navigating back to Landing Page.

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Finding

Signup / Login Page

Looks great and easy to use. But, some content could be displayed before requiring them to sign up

Landing page

It contains some good features but the space utilization could be improved furthermore.

Career Page

The middle portion is well-designed but the bars on both the sides could require some design modification

Learning Page

The most significant portion of the page should be placed in the middle so that it is easy to locate as you land on that page

People Page

They like some familiarity with the existing social media platforms but giving an exact same design could hinder the task to persuade them into shifting to our platform

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