Praxis Impact
Finding the right learning opportunities for students
A platform that helps university administrators find, match and track hands-on learning opportunities for thousands of students.
My role
UX Designer
Built the concept map, interview script, workflows, wireframes and usability test plan, then partnered with our visual designer on the hi-fi.
Teammates
Shardul & Jacob
Fellow UX designers on the capstone team.
Timeline
25 weeks
A capstone with a real client, from kick-off to a hi-fi prototype.
The problem
Learning by doing is great. Running it is not.
Experiential learning means learning by doing: students take on hands-on work and reflect on it, so what they learned in class finally connects to the real world.
Behind every internship sits a program administrator. They find opportunities for thousands of students across many disciplines, and each one has to work for the partner organization and actually grow the student’s skills.
Our brief: start from scratch, and make this easy and intuitive with technology.
Getting our bearings
Before designing anything, we had to see the whole system
Kick-off · Sprint brief
Learning how our client actually works
Our client ran experiential learning at a university. In the kick-off I learned their day to day: how they spot potential partner organizations and how they connect them with students. Each sprint started with a brief like this one.
Concept map
Mapping who’s involved, and how they connect
To avoid designing for one person and forgetting the rest, I built a concept map: a web of the players, objects and interactions that make up the ecosystem. It surfaced four players we had to design for:
- University administrators
- Partner recruiters
- Students
- Instructors
Version 1 came from the kick-off. As interviews came in, I kept redrawing it to match what we were really hearing.
Competitive analysis
Was this already solved?
10 products → 3 shortlisted → 0 solved it
We compared the three on target users, problems solved, features and value proposition. They were powerful, but none helped users identify, define and track their processes while staying connected with peers. That gap became our focus.
Listening
Hundreds of quotes, a few big truths
Stakeholder interviews
Talking to the people doing the work
I wrote an interview script to keep our conversations with the university administration team on track. Two problems kept coming up:
- Business tools feel foreign
Users generally don’t have a high-level understanding of traditional business management.
- Academia is tangled
Relationships between stakeholders are more complex than in a conventional business.
Affinity mapping
Grouping, regrouping, and grouping again
Early analysis gave us a few insights, but we wanted the bigger themes. We grouped and regrouped hundreds of direct quotes into buckets until clear patterns emerged.
Survey · Testing an assumption
Would this work beyond one university?
We’d assumed the platform could scale to universities across the country. Instead of hoping, we tested it: a survey to hundreds of administrators about their processes, their problems and how they solved them today.
Nobody could ask us what a question meant, so the survey had to stand on its own. We iterated on it several times, testing it with peers and stakeholders first.
Shaping the product
From people to flows to screens
On paper it looked like a simple CRM for administrators. The ecosystem made it anything but, so we kept experts close throughout to check our understanding of users’ habits, tasks and mental models.
Personas & user flows
Three groups, many scenarios, one structure
The affinity map shaped three persona groups, and I wrote scenarios for each. Every scenario needs actions to reach its goal, so I assigned those actions to screens and ordered them into workflows. That became the platform’s information architecture.
I sketched every screen from the workflows on paper, a quick way to try lots of ideas, aimed at specific design problems. The strongest ideas went into mid-fidelity wireframes that pinned down how every component behaves, with interaction notes explaining the dependencies for later.
Design problem 1 · How might we
…show what matters most on a dashboard, at a glance?
Design problem 2 · How might we
…help people find opportunities fast, and view them flexibly?
Putting it in front of users
Did it make sense to the people who’d use it?
We tested the mid-fidelity prototype on purpose, so people reacted to how it worked, not how it looked. I wrote a test plan with tasks targeting what we most needed to validate, like whether the dashboard was intuitive and the navigation easy to use, and built a clickable prototype for each scenario. Participants were experiential learning administrators of different ages and experience, with different processes.
A pilot ironed out where we might be misunderstood. During sessions we marked notes on printed copies of the interface to build a heatmap of what worked and what didn’t, then went back through the recordings for specific changes.
What we saw
Many participants stumbled on the platform’s terminology, and the process tool was hard to grasp quickly.
What we changed
Added onboarding that walks users through the process tool as they set up for the first time: what it is, and how to use it to set up and track their processes.
The final solution
Giving it a look and feel
With every screen’s functionality fixed, I worked with our visual designer on a mood board and inspiration board, which became the style guide. The hi-fi mockups followed it while keeping everything we’d defined in the wireframes.
Looking back
What’s next
- Fill out the hi-fi prototype: interactions across pages, a modal view, a calendar view and a page for collaborating with peers.
- More states for the Opportunities screen.
- Keep pairing rapid prototyping with quick usability tests.
What I learned
This capstone taught me what it’s like to design for a live project with real impact on people. We hit setbacks and owned our failures together, and along the way built the habits to coordinate, communicate and deliver something we’re proud of.