Client UX Research:

UMich Stamps School of Art and Design

OVERVIEW

This is a team UX research project conducted for the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design.  Our team used a systematical consulting and contextual inquiry procedure, including background research, contextual interviews, interpretation & synthesis, and submitting the final proposal. In the end, our team put forward 6 main findings and over 20 corresponding recommendations. Our client was satisfied with the final proposal and much of it would become the institute’s new practices.

Role

Tools

Time Range


UX RESEARCHER
INTERVIEWER
REPORT WRITER

‍

FIGMA
CANVA
MIRO
MICROSOFT WORD

YEAR 2022
12 WEEKS

MY TEAM

TEAMATES

Yian Gong
Haoting Gao
Qianzi Li
Mingxi Wu

PROCESS OVERVIEW

01
RESEARCH

•Background Research•

Who is our client?
The mission of the Stamps School of Art & Design is to become a worldwide recognized leader in interdisciplinary art and design education to cultivate the next generation of globally competitive creative professionals who can participate and collaborate responsibly. The Stamps School offers an undergraduate degree in art and design and two graduate-level degrees: an MFA in Art and an MDes in Integrative Design.
What is our client's work flow?
Our clients from Stamps School need to assign roles to give specific permission to students and employees through the OARS, such as course override permission, new employee courses permission, etc. Figure below shows how they interact with each other and ITS staff.
What is the client problem?
OARS is an online access request system to request and approve "roles." As a user of OARS, the staff of Stamps school faces many inconveniences when they need to request for access in OARS. Figure above shows the relationship between Stamp’s staff and the OARS. Centralized documents are needed to clarify the relationships between the role, work contents, and admission courses. Hence, hundreds of employees need help finding the work contents and courses by typing their roles in the search bar. Stamps employees need to find another person with the knowledge they are looking for to guide them to make the request orally.
Arising Problem
Solution
My team found out that our client is responsible for the administration part of the system workflow, therefore they do not have access to the technical side of the problem. This led to our team concerning whether our final proposal can be possibly implemented on the hardware level or not.
We arranged a quick online meeting with our client to make sure that our proposal can be delivered to the system maintainers. It turned out that technical group members do exist in our interviewee list, which means that our team’s recommendation can get to the technical side of stakeholders.

02
INTERVIEW

•Interview Protocol•

Before starting the interview, we prepared a detailed and careful interview protocol with questions & follow-ups targeting different stakeholder groups.

•Contextual Interview•

Contextual Interviews are one-on-one interviews conducted in the user's workspace that focus on observations of ongoing work (Holtzblatt, 2005). It is an important method to gather data for design improvements.  Within the one-month interview window, we included diverse participants and scheduled eight interviews with our stakeholders, which included four administrators, three ITS representatives, and one new staff. Interviews were conducted with a combination of question-answer format and walkthrough scenarios.
Arising Problem
Solution
No staff was on the interview list, but staffs were a major group of stakeholders of the system. Without interviewing them, we would have zero idea about their opinions and dilemmas. This concerned our team since knowing views and thoughts from all parties and stakeholders is crucial to a rational and comprehensive proposal.
We explained our concern to our client and they agreed to add a staff member as interviewee for us to interview.

03
INTERPRET & SYNTHESIZE

•Affinity Wall & Findings•

Following the interview, qualitative analysis was conducted to identify key and major thoughts from our collected data. The major method our team used is the affinity diagram. Japanese ethnologist Jiro Kawakita created affinity mapping to organize complex, immeasurable, non-repetitive, behavioral, and qualitative data using spatial arrangement (Scupin, 1997). To be more specific, we extracted our interviewee’s insight from the notes taken during the interview and replays of the recordings after the interview and grouped them into more than 400 sticky notes based on their connections (Figure 3). After the grouping is formed, key themes are extracted to label each grouping. Then, those labels were grouped again to form more overarching themes. With the iterative process, six key findings were identified to represent the core concerns of our client. 

04
FINALIZE

•Final Presentataion•

•Final Report•

Fallen in love with creation and exploration.