Building Student Community with StudyLink
What was the problem?
The University of Michigan has many study spaces and many students who need to use them. It takes them a significant amount of time to find one that fits their requirements for noise level, space, and other conditions which also change from individual study to teamwork situations. Students have come up with creative ways to utilize their networks and these spaces already, but we thought we could improve the experience even more by amplifying this community's potential for connection.
Synthesizing this qualitative data into actionable insights about the true nature of the problem allowed us to refine our approach and guided our prototyping.
We engaged the student community in order to understand what was truly important to them.
Process
Prototyping
We had learned that relying on friend groups and classmates to help with homework, hold optimal study spaces, and take breaks were important aspects for the student community. We prototyped ways to amplify those aspects and introduce new ways to build community around studying. We called our tool StudyLink, as it would create more ways for students to "link" up with eachother around studying.
Final Delivery
We gained useful feedback on these concepts and created final prototype wireframes to present to students in an entrepreneurship class. The presentation included a full report or our methods as well as the next steps which would be required to implement StudyLink, which included digital and physical aspects to be installed in the study spaces.
One of the interactions we prototyped, sorting study spaces by different factors.