Purple Planner
Purple Planner is a dynamic scheduling tool made for international students at Northwestern that keeps track of industry timelines, visa requirements, and recommended career advancement opportunities from Northwestern’s own career advancement offices all in one place.
Problem: International students find it difficult to find all the information related to their career opportunities and synthesize it in a way that makes sense to them.
My Contributions: User interviews, graphics, research synthesis and presentation
Background Research
Stakeholder map from the perspective of an international student at Northwestern looking for career opportunities
Process
Our first step as a team was to understand what the current career services and resources looked like for students at Northwestern. As a team we explored what it was like to navigate the career offices and built upon our past experiences with the service.
We conducted interviews with peers and career office faculty to understand what pain-points and opportunities were present.
As a team, we felt that most of our energy centered around international students and decided to focus our project on this particular set of stakeholders.
Prototypes & Testing
The team created several lo-fi prototypes to test with our peers and present to the career offices.
We created prototypes for the overall planner and several potential features.
Testing synthesis for overall calendar format
Acknowledgements
Testing synthesis for comparative timelines
What we learned:
Students want information on the planner to be presented in a digestible format so that they can easily identify the actions and opportunities relevant to them
Having relevant career deadlines and opportunities centralized reduces the need to crosscheck different sources and sites, which helps students plan out their careers more efficiently and confidently
While being able to compare an individual student to their peers may be an added stress to students, some students would prefer the option to decide whether they see this information or not rather than the service deciding for them so that they are able to access the information when they feel comfortable
“How Might We” statements coming out of our first round of research
Course: Human Centered Service Design
Client: Northwestern Engineering Career Development Offices
Project Length: January - March 2020
Team Members: Brain Sui, Jacob Leaf, Shea McHenry
Framework of our understanding of Northwestern career services after conducting interviews with students and faculty
Personas created from the reoccurring themes gathered in research. We decided to continue with “Motivated Mary” as our main persona
What we learned:
International students find it difficult to find all the information related to their career logistics and synthesize all that information in a way that makes sense
International students tend feel a looming fear of deportation as a result of their uncertainty in navigating their onboarding processes
NCA and ECD readily provide resources to students for the application and interviewing phases of recruiting but do not make resources regarding the post-decision phase as apparent.
Students don’t feel like resources, such as NCA, are able to grow with them past the internship phase of their career advancement
Students are surprised to learn that securing a full-time position requires a different set of skills than the skills they used for finding internships
Journey map from the perspective of our persona, “Motivated Mary“
Synthesis framework regarding international students
Brainstorming session for prototypes
Testing synthesis for initial survey that would personalize calendar
I’d like to thank my team members for all their work throughout the quarter and making the experience so enjoyable.
A huge thank you to the career offices at Northwestern for taking the time to participate in this project and guiding us throughout the quarter.
I’d also like to thank our Instructor, Liz Gerber for introducing us to the wonderful world of service design.