The Resource Compass

Overview of the project

User Research, UI Design, Ideation

*Note: This project was completed with a team of 6 designers.

Role

Project Duration

This project took place over 3 months and was completed in April of 2022.

Tools Used

Figma, InDesign, Canva, Illustrator

Step 1: Empathize

In Winter 2022, Wilfrid Laurier University’s Deans of Students Offices launched a multi-campus review in collaboration with Unless Design Partners of student wellness at Laurier in order to better understand student engagement with wellness services and subsequently support their well-being overall.

Design Goal

“How might we create a tool that improves resource awareness and takes the onus off of students to identify and navigate wellness-related resources?”

User Needs Statements

  1. Students need to easily find and navigate wellness-related information in a way that doesn't overwhelm them.

  2. Students need to be able to identify which service(s) that they need.

  3. Students need empathy and timely support for their unique and diverse needs regarding student wellness.

User Personas

We transformed these user needs into a more digestible, and applicable format through the use of personas. These generative research artifacts are direct reflections of the needs and issues we identified during user needs analysis, and thus serve as a meaningful guide in our solution development process.

User Journey Maps

In addition, we furthered the generative research by creating journey maps for each of our respective personas, outlining the exact actions they would demonstrate.

Step 2 and 3: Define and Ideate

As a team, we wanted to understand what students were working with when trying to navigate wellness resources. We thought that by continuing to put ourselves in their shoes, we could understand their struggles better.

Gathering Research

We started by creating a resource inventory of all Laurier resources related to mental wellness, using an existing framework, the seven dimensions of wellness.

We compiled 93 individual resources from all wellness-related units at Laurier including the Wellness Centre, Academic Advising, Financial Aid and more.

Step 4 and 5: Prototype and Test

Low and Medium Fidelity Prototypes

After our initial sketches, we started looking at our journey maps, identifying pathway flows and identifying a design system to follow. We explored Wilfrid Laurier University’s website, looking into branding requirements and the UI elements they used to ensure our widget looks natural against the Laurier web pages.

We created all necessary screens utilizing the 10 Usability Heuristics as a framework. From there we added interactive components to support all tasks needed for our first round of usability testing.

Testing Feedback

We made the appropriate changes based on this feedback to create a final prototype, such as:

  • Improve visibility of the resource compass widget by incorporating a pop-up or text box demonstrating its location on the webpage.

  • Rephrase or redesign the Physical Health option to more accurately indicate the category

  • Add an information page including further details about the categories and what services and resources are available.

  • When building out additional pathways, continue to ensure that there are a variety of ways to get to the same resources. For example, academic support can be found both through the Mental Wellness and Academic & Career support pathways.

Final Prototype

Using the research findings and our previous prototypes, we finalized the prototype with a full flow for students to request wellness services.

Conclusion and next steps

Completed Pathways

We explored 3 potential pathways, but more testing is needed before implementation in order to account for all possible flows.

Partnering with Services

We have a lot of wellness units at Laurier to collaborate with to make full use of our resource compass. We need to take steps to identify current practices from these offices, how their services would dynamically work into our widget, the level of maintenance required and steps to ensure the solution accounts for Laurier’s rate of growth.

Unmoderated Testing

We need to explore testing with students who might not know what kind of resource they're looking for before using the compass.

Further Research

In future iterations, it would be interesting to develop the idea of our service as a tool for helping to advance critical thinking in students and passively teach them those skills about not only navigation, and wellness overall.