Case study: Designing a community for students launching side projects
CoCreate is a community at Cornell University that helps students bring their side projects to fruition. We want to help launch creatives.
Beyond their classwork at Cornell, students often embark on challenging entrepreneurial pursuits in their free time. They aim to solve real-world problems on their college campuses and beyond. Often, these creative pursuits are referred to as “side projects.” Over the past semester, as a group of four student designers, we focused on improving the experience of finding side projects for students at Cornell.
Cornell University has a total enrollment every year that often is above 20,000+ students. We knew that there was a pool of talented students with experiences across various functional domains — there are students who have skills in engineering, design, business, and more. However, there is friction present in finding project partners. There has been not been an inclusive community that enables any student to easily find other students and freely operate to work on the projects they want to work on.
As a result, we hoped to bridge the gap and create a product that would connect students together to work on side projects. Our group set out to design “CoCreate” — a community where Cornell students can join side projects, follow interesting categories, post their own side projects, and find partners to work with.
My role: UX Designer, UX Researcher
Final Interaction: The solution we created below allows users to use our platform, CoCreate, to discover side projects at Cornell.
Learn more about our design process below!
The “People Problem” We Are Solving For
People Problem: As a student, when I want to pursue side projects to gain experience, I often need a group of people with various skill sets to work with them, so that I have the right team & human capital to successfully work on a project. However, it is often difficult to do this:
1. It might be difficult to find students that would be willing to put time into it.
2. It’s hard to find people with various skills required for this side project.
3. I might not have a project idea to begin with and want to look for other ideas.
Understanding the Student-Creator Ecosystem at Cornell And How People Work on Side Projects
We began our journey by interviewing students at Cornell who previously worked on side projects and found a few key insights.
1. Students initiate side projects by searching in their own network of friends and who they are familiar with — and this often can limit the potential team members they have.
“mainly reached out to friends via Facebook but would’ve wanted to find other teammates as well”
“asked friends first when looking for partners”
2. When working on a side project, students prioritize an incentive: learning & the journey of growth. Their main focus is primarily to gain new skills rather than optimize for potential results.
“enjoy it when team members […] can learn together”
“don’t care if the project is profitable — care more about learning”
“want to learn new technologies [and] open to learning new tools”
“main inspiration […] is to learn new skills”
3. Students want team members who are reliable: those who are easy to communicate with and have good time management skills.
“time management and communication skills are important when finding team members”
looking for “good collaboration”
“team dynamic is important — can we get along?”
“similar values”
4. Students look for other students with the skillsets needed for the side project they will be working on. They want to work with students who have technical talent necessary for their project to succeed.
“looking for technically skilled people”
“looked for those with relevant skills”
“liked having group members with a large breadth of skills”
User Research
The user group we concentrated on was students who are creators and have a desire to pursue side projects — specifically, these are students who ultimately struggle to find ideas or people to work with. We developed an interview protocol and interviewed four students. Our team hoped to learn more about the past experiences of students who worked on side projects. Using our recorded notes from interviews, we developed an affinity diagram below.
Persona:
We formed a persona by the name of “James” to reflect our findings from the user research we conducted. This persona was created after our affinity diagramming above.
Identifying Persona Goals & User Requirements:
We began by categorizing persona goals & user requirements into various groupings as characterized below.
Ideation:
Initial Brainstorming:
After a bit of team brainstorming, we narrowed down our potential solutions into six different opportunities: a side project social media network, a platform that links resources by skill, a version of “EdX” for projects & teams, an app for posting projects & finding teams within Cornell, a side project network for finding partners, and a project partner browsing app.
As we began to narrow down our brainstorming ideas and envision them into practical solutions, this led us to evaluate the various existing solution spaces and current solutions in the market right now.
Market Research of Existing Solution Spaces:
We found four types of solution spaces and listed examples within each below, along with potential shortcomings associated with each existing solution space.
Communities where you post side projects and recruit partners:
Hard to form a strong understanding/bond of potential partners
It’s hard to find people within your college, as people gravitate towards working with people nearbyExamples: Nomad Projects, Collaborizm, Quaranteam
Bootcamps:
Exclusivity, no low barrier of entry
Restricted to small time period — not long term, rushed project processExamples: Origin, BKYD, Hackathons
Networks:
May not have the primary intent of side projects, they’re not conducive to starting side projectsExamples: CuELinks, LinkedIn
On-going communities:
Exclusivity, no low barrier of entry (prefers a certain level of working experience or demonstrated experience)Examples: Cornell Engineering Project Teams, Cornell Creatives, Clubfest, eHub
Our solution: CoCreate
We decided to design a website for a side projects community open to Cornell students called “CoCreate.” Using the ideas we brainstormed, our evaluation of existing solution spaces, and listening to our users’ needs from research, we went forward with creating this solution.
Our solution entailed four main tasks:
- Finding an interesting side project to join (top left)
- Interacting with a side projects community by subscribing to a project, liking a project, and adding a comment (top right)
- Posting a side project (bottom left)
- Searching for potential partners to join your project team (bottom right)
How Everything Fits In — Information Hierarchy
Paper Prototype: Low-Fidelity Sketches
Here is a video walkthrough of the low-fidelity sketches for our prototype, and audio is included for further accessibility. This was developed as a way to receive feedback and identify any friction that users faced. We used any identified pain points to create actionable changes.
Feedback From Users
- “Joining a project” — interface for connections and project description: users did not find the number of mutual connections to be particularly useful. Instead, users focus on the names of mutual connections. Further, when users clicked “request to join,” users went back and forth in order to see the project description. It makes more sense to place project info next to the message input.
- “Interacting with the community” — comments UI: the comments button looked like a search icon and could be more of a traditional comment icon instead. Additionally, it can be removed completely due to confusion (occurs in high-fidelity prototype).
- “Posting a project” — unclear flow: users complained that the process of posting a project was confusion, as it may have been misconstrued with recruiting members too. The recruitment section was not divided well and could be separated better using Gestalt’s principle of common region.
- “Searching for partners” —making it easier to find partners: user feedback included wanting a clearer page when searching for partner that enables better discovery and finding people to recruit.
Medium-Fidelity Prototype
After further analyzing the feedback our users provided for our low-fidelity prototype, we implemented these suggestions by creating a medium-fidelity prototype.
Goals & Metrics:
After the creation of our medium fidelity prototype, we found four additional users to test our prototype with. We established relevant goals & metrics prior to our usability test sessions. Next, we began conducting usability tests with 4 different individuals.
Usability Testing:
From our usability tests with four users, we developed a list of UPIs (UX Problem Instances) and UPDs (UX Design Problems). It is also linked here in this Google Sheets document.
Here are some of our main UPDs and solutions we considered:
- Users had confusion with the project post creation flow
Solution: the order of completion of tasks for the project creation flow was a bit overwhelming, so the subtasks were split onto separate screens. - Users encountered difficulty interacting with individuals and their profiles
Solution: Users did not understand the purpose of the page, so solutions we considered involved indicating that the “people” page is intended for recruiting partners, changing “connections” to “mutual connections,” and making the profile page look more consistent with profile pages as traditionally seen on other websites. - Users found it challenging to subscribe to a project
Solution: Users didn’t know how to subscribe to a project, so more user feedback was added to clearly show that a category was subscribed to when clicking on the icon, display that a subscribed category would be added to “categories you subscribe to,” and making the project component consistent between this flow and the homepage.
High Fidelity Prototype:
After we conducted our usability tests, we used our analysis of UPIs and UPDs above to improve our prototype and develop our high-fidelity prototype. Below is our final interaction!
CoCreate Poster Presentation:
At the end, our team worked together to create a poster graphic for our product! We presented this to over 200+ students in our course, consisting of 40+ teams. This provides a higher level overview of our process, from beginning to end.
Next Steps:
Of course, we couldn’t have built out everything we hoped to in one semester. I am proud of what our team accomplished, and CoCreate has tremendous opportunity for growth in the future. Here are a few features I would consider building out next if time permits in the future.
- Building out the profile UI and flow, so that users can can have a “profile page.”
- Designing a “share” feature that enables users to easily post or showcase these side projects on other platforms.
- Creating a “team” or “projects” feature and flow to provide the user with an interface when they continue to engage with a project after joining the project.
Conclusion:
Ultimately, I wanted to contribute to this project because it focuses on how to unite students at Cornell and create an inclusive community to solve challenging problems together. We wanted everyone to have the opportunity to work on side projects and lower the barrier to entry. At Cornell, there are selective organizations that require students to go through an application process to work on similar projects. As a member of these organizations, I have learned that it is a numbers game — every student at Cornell has the potential to do great things, and when surrounded by other students committed to creating an impact, they can influence each other to create products effectively. We want everyone to have the opportunity to work on their side project, whether it’s a startup idea, hobby, or anything else. I am also glad that this was a great learning experience for me in terms of the journey of growing as a product designer.
Reflection:
Learning about product design has been a phenomenal experience. I have always followed the advice of surrounding yourself with people who will challenge you and help you grow. My teammates are the people who brought the best out of me and taught me a lot about UX design. This course, INFO 3450, was great for understanding the design thinking process. It provided a comprehensive way to combine the theory & practice of UX design. I’m excited to take the next course (INFO 4400) and also be a TA for Human-Computer Interaction Design (INFO 3450) in the Spring.
Team Members:
Manan Modi, Ravina Patel, Rachel Zhang, and Tia Montgomery
Check out my previous case study here!
