We created a design with nontraditional students as our users. Most of the people pursuing the certificates are either working professionals who have been out of school for some time or students trying to make a switch to technology. These students are not always the most familiar with the technical terminology and might feel overwhelmed. We tried to remedy this by using the “map of computer science” as a way to explain the roles of different certificates in the technology world. We wanted to start by gathering the perspectives and requirements from all the stakeholders. Since we already had the requirements from CCI through the competition, we wanted to get students’ perspective on the issue as well. I am fortunate enough to have been a TA for DSCI-511 (Intro. to data science) DSCI-521 (Second course in the sequence) and CS-570 (Intro to computer programming) and this has given me an opportunity to discuss this project with my past students. I think their input is invaluable in a project such as this because they are the ones who would be using the platform in the end. I talked with three of my past students who represent the broad categories of students who are usually interested in the certificate programs. The first category is working professionals who are either trying to make a career switch or are trying to get updated with the latest technology. This category of students is represented with our user persona Julia. Julia is a business analyst at a leading bank who is working full time and trying to switch into more technical roles at her company. She is looking for courses that can get her proficient in programming so she can complement that knowledge with her business background and work experience to create more value at her firm. The second type of student that I have encountered is represented by Justin. Justin is a fresh political science graduate and is interested in psephology, he has the strong foundation in political science theory but is looking to get more analytical skills and hopefully work towards a masters. Justin is trying to get a strong foundation in computer science and analytics but is not sure what certificates best fit his career goals. The third type of students is represented by James. James is a software developer with a computer science undergraduate degree. He is exploring certificates that can help him be up to date with the latest technologies. He has a strong technical background and has a clear idea of what certificates and in degrees he is interested in. After discussing the project with Julia, Justin and James, we went to the drawing board and brainstormed some ideas that we could present to our audience and get some feedback on. We shared our sketches with everyone and got a few inputs and went through this iterative process a few times. Once we had a good idea of what our users were looking for, we started working on the wireframe prototype. We chose Figma for prototyping and created all the components from scratch. We ran into some challenges during the project, mainly because of our inexperience with UI/UX design but it was very rewarding to learn about new design concepts and implement them in our project. Our design philosophy goal was to gamify the experience as much as possible so that it could be accessible for our users and we hope that our design can help students identify the best certificates for their career and make progress towards their goals.
Built With
- figma
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