Discover Funding at Dartmouth

Full experience build

Project Summary

For this project, two other students and I were tasked with improving the funding search process for opportunities such as internships, research, travel, etc. at Dartmouth College from a UI/UX perspective by the Provost’s office in March 2019.

We drew insights from our interviews with 41 students, 11 campus organizations, and 2 representatives from the IT department to decide on the following specifications for a successful solution These specifications are as follows:

The system must:

Make students aware of what funding is available
Clearly provide eligibility information, so that students do not waste time pursuing funding sources for which they are ineligible
Be comprehensive and updated
Provide opportunities for personal connections and networking to learn more information about the funding sources and individual experiences with it

From this initial user research, we noted two markets within our target user group, the students: those students who were beginning to explore funding and just wanted to know what options existed and what could be done with funding from the school, and those students who already had an opportunity in mind and wanted to obtain funding for that exact opportunity. We came up with a central website in which students could find funding sources tailored to their personal interests and opportunities.

We conducted 39 user testing sessions over 3 prototype iterations, beginning with paper prototypes and then moving to a high-fidelity prototype in Figma.

My Contribution

Alongside my two teammates, I conducted my equal share of the initial user interviews and solution brainstorming (~33%), completed more than my share of paper prototyping (~50%), and then transitioned to take the lead on the user testing interviews and the hifi creation (75-85%) while my two teammates took the lead on the final documentation and presentation material.

See It in Action

I made this demo video from the Figma prototype with my voiceover to present to our client in Dartmouth’s Provost office.

Process

Insights from user interviews

After covering two whiteboards with sticky notes full of notes from user interviews with 41 students, 11 campus organizations, and 2 representatives from the IT department, we began brainstorming solution possibilities.

Brainstorming in the problem space

After generating many possible responses to the problem that met our specified requirements, we narrowed the scope to the most promising and expanded on those ideas. This image shows a first sketch of the structure of our Discover Funding site.

User flow sketches

This whiteboard shows the first real screen flow sketch.

Lo-fi user testing (cont.)

We transitioned from the whiteboard to markers on paper to generate low-fidelity prototypes of the site to test with users. We gave them an initial scenario with goal sets taken from our initial user research, and asked them to interact with the “site” in the way they thought it should work. Users “clicked” with their fingers (pictured), and then we would transition their view to the next (paper) screen manually. We encouraged them to think aloud as they interacted with the site, and paused to ask them questions about what they anticipated would happen if they “clicked” a button, for example. In total we conducted 39 user testing sessions over 3 prototype iterations: this was the first prototype.

Distilled testing insights

After testing, we collected our detailed notes and distilled them into actionable insights, organizing them by screen, to implement into our high-fidelity Figma prototype.

Pages

Explore: Sort by Experience

The “Explore” half of the site targets the younger students who are curious about opportunities for funding at Dartmouth, but do not have a specific internship or adventure in mind. After clicking the “Explore” tile on the front page of the site, students would be taken to the page below to the left, where they would see featured recent funded student experiences, with an informational blurb available upon hover and a full testimonial available upon click. These Featured Experiences tiles serve as an inspiration point for those curious students who have no idea where to start.

For those students who have some idea of what type of opportunity for which they might want to acquire funding, the filters bar below the Featured Experiences tile serve as their starting point. Students can input their general interest area (e.g. backpacking, public health, international studies, etc.), type of opportunity that might interest them (e.g. conference, travel, internship, etc.), location (domestic, international, remote), academic season at Dartmouth they might be available to go (which is on a quarter system), and duration (number of weeks).

The results page shows the user the filters applied above student testimonials from experiences that match the user’s interests. The user can be inspired, informed, and understand which funding sources powered these experiences.

Find: Sort by Funding Source

The “Find” half of the site targets users seeking funding for a specific opportunity (e.g. internship) that they already specifically have in mind or hand. Clicking “Find” from the site front page takes the user to an Entry Quiz which allows them to tailor their results to only the funding relevant to their opportunity with a high degree of specification. Critically, the student would see only the Funding sources for which their opportunity is eligible on the results page.

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