Equip

Discovery Survey

Objective

Discover a university service that would benefit from an AI assistant.

{Some} Survey Questions

• What services are you aware that CDM offers students? If none, please enter "none."
• Which services have you used in the last year as a CDM School of Design student, if any?
• Pick the top 3 services that you think are the most beneficial for students to access.
• Do you have any suggestions on how CDM can improve one or more of the services they offer? What changes can be made to the service to improve it based on its purpose?

Findings

Only 26.7% of our interviewees used the offerings of the Career Center but 73% of participants found the Career Center services necessary and beneficial for students.

This led to our focus on the career center out of many university services.

Discovery Interviews

Objective

Understanding students' experience at DePaul Career Center and how they learn and acquire new skills.

{Some} Interview Questions

• Are you familiar with the Career Center? If yes, tell me about the last time you used their services and how was your experience? If no, is there a reason you have not used the services of the Career Center?
• How are you currently preparing to train and improve yourself on the skills you lack?
• If there were one service you wish you would like the university's Career Center to offer to improve your CDM experience, what would it be?
• How do you currently go about learning about events/workshops that occur at DePaul?
• What are your thoughts on an intelligent assistant?

Interview Data

Findings

• Students need to trust the source of career advice.
• Students want to see the personal relevance of career resources and opportunities to their identified career goals.
• Students need guidance for long-term goal-setting and accountability for meeting their career goals.
• Students want to clearly see the value of where they invest time & energy while building skills.

“[I wish there were] events that were capped. Not because I think they should be exclusive, but because I think it’s hard to get face time. I think [career fairs] should be organized in a way that’s more segmented.”— DePaul CDM HCI Student

Design Opportunities

Based on our findings, we came up with several "how might we?" design opportunities:

• How might we assist students in navigating to the right resources for their specific goals?
• How might we supplement classes with career services that follow the specific path of a student?
• How might we connect students to the Career Center by appealing to their skills, goals, and interests?
• How might we provide a place for students to track their progress toward achieving their career goals?

Group Brainstorming Activity

Lo-Fi Prototype

In the first stage of the design phase, we created the first iteration of our prototype through the use of sketching and low-fidelity mock-ups.

Through group brainstorm, we decided to focus on design opportunities such as skill tracking, personalized event suggestions, and a comprehensive data policy.

Hi-Fi Prototype

Through many design sessions and iterations, we were able to design a functional, high-fidelity prototype displaying what we decided were the main features of the Equip application: the data policy/onboarding, progress page, and resource suggestion (as seen below).

Reflection

This project was the first time I designed specifically for an AI-driven product. I had the opportunity to learn more about data ethics and data collection in order to provide the best user experience with this smart assistant application. I really enjoyed learning these concepts, and as automation and AI continue to take over the technological world, I hope to design more AI-driven products in the future.