iMajor
Helping students choose a major with the people who’ve already lived it.
Overview
Choosing a major can feel like choosing your whole future.
iMajor is a networking, major-assistance mobile app. In response to the struggle that surrounds choosing a college major, our team of five University of Texas at Austin students designed it to connect current and prospective students with people from their college (in this case UT) who have already lived the degree, for realistic insight into what it can offer.
iMajor, in the app
Problem statement
Academic decisions, like choosing a major, can feel overwhelmingly binding when you weigh your time, money, passions and potential future.
Committing to a path for 2–4 years without a consistent way to weigh the options and choose the “right” one can lead to extended degree completion, insufficient funding and unnecessary stress. How can college students make a more informed and assured decision?
Why should we care?
We started out sure that students just needed better information. That turned out to be only half of it.
Solution
Every path into a major, and the people who’ve walked it, in one place.
iMajor is a networking, major-assistance mobile app. My part was the search page. Students without a clear idea can discover potential interests through lists of alumni, students, majors, minors and more. Students with an idea can search a specific field and get a “bird’s eye” view of everything about it.
Three features, one for each need research uncovered. They return in every section below.
Process
Okay, but wait... how did we get here?
Research
25 interviews across prospective, current and transfer students, alumni and advisors
Define
Affinity mapping, key pain points, stakeholder mapping
Ideate
Crazy 20’s, Disney Creative Strategy, storyboarding
Prototype & Test
User flows, wireframes, lo-fi Think-Aloud testing
Refine
High-fidelity iterations, reflection and next steps
Interviews
So we asked 25 people how they really chose.
To understand how students navigate major selection, we interviewed 25 participants at different stages of the decision, so we could uncover how their needs change over time.
Who we talked to
Affinity mapping
Click to view in detail
The main problem: the process of choosing a major isn’t simplified enough.
Insights
The information was out there. Students trusted people more.
Three pain points kept coming up, from prospective students to alumni.
Information exists, but it’s fragmented
Resources exist but are scattered across multiple platforms, making them overwhelming and hard to navigate.
Students rely on people more than official resources
Students were often heavily influenced by friends, family, alumni, advisors and even academic departments over official materials.
The one that mattered mostStudents want exploration and targeted research
Students needed open-ended exploration when uncertain, and targeted, specific searches when they had a direction in mind.
Stakeholder map
Choosing a major was never a solo decision.
We mapped every entity, whether individuals, organizations or resources, that directly or indirectly helped with choosing a major, to understand what was already out there and what we could bring to the table. It became clear that students were heavily influenced by friends, family and alumni.
Click to view in detail
So insight #2, students rely on people more than official resources, became the focus of our solution.
Individual ideation
Twenty ideas, from reach-out recommendations to a Bevo chatbot.
Crazy 20’s ideation filled our pages with ideas like reach-out recommendations, networking scheduling systems and even a Bevo chatbot (our mascot).
Personas
Grounded in what we learned about our users and the resources already helping them, we created 2 personas. Both were choosing a major, but their information needs were very different, which kept us from designing a one-size-fits-all experience.
Group ideation
Then the strongest ideas kept pointing the same way.
With strong directions across our different ideas, we used the Disney Creative Strategy framework. The team split into 4 roles to condense the ideas for iMajor. As we collaborated, the strongest feature concepts lined up with the three key interview findings, and we combined them into a single ecosystem that supports students in one place.
Concepts
Which we made sure reflected our research
Storyboarding
Would it fit into a real student’s decision?
To check that our concepts fit naturally into real decision-making, we drew storyboards of what our users were going through, and where iMajor comes in. For each of the top 3 feature concepts, we made 2 storyboards showing alternative tasks or personas, so each design idea and its rationale reflected a real student’s experience.
“Have you ever been unhappy in your current major, but didn’t know what else to go into?”
“Have you ever been undecided about choosing a major during high school?”
User flow
Many ways in, because students arrive at different moments.
With our features solid, the challenge became balancing exploration with information overload. The search flow, the feature I was in charge of, lets students discover information, evaluate options, connect with people and save information for later. Instead of a linear process, it has multiple entry points, because in our interviews students entered the major-selection journey at very different stages.
My piece: the search page, from user flow to high fidelity.
Click to view in detail
Paper prototypes & wireframing
Four flows on paper first.
To get the most out of user testing, we sketched 4 detailed conceptual wireframe flows from our user flows, aiming first to answer:
- 01Can users understand the overall concept?
- 02Does the information architecture make sense?
- 03Are the proposed features discoverable?
Low-fidelity prototypes
Then low fidelity, ready for someone else’s hands.
Once the wireframes showed how our research could become a realistic product experience, we turned them into low-fidelity prototypes to run by potential users. Each prototype had at least 3 tasks, and each task at least 5 interactions, so participants could use it on their own during our study.
Usability testing
Then we handed students the search page and asked them to think out loud.
We ran usability testing with participants from different academic backgrounds and levels of certainty about their major, using a Think-Aloud protocol: each participant worked through the tasks we gave them and spoke their thoughts as they went, which gave us rich, qualitative insight.
The 4 tasks
Making a search
“Imagine you opened the app and wanted to make a search for UX Design. Can you show me how you would do that and talk about it out loud?”
Filtering a search
“Imagine you are on the search page and wanted to filter your alumni search by “Graduation Years” of 2015 and 2017. Can you show me how you would do that and talk about it out loud?”
Saving a search
“Imagine you wanted to save the previous search you made with the filtering settings you applied (Alumni & Graduation Years) and be able to find them all in one place. Can you show me how you would do that and talk about it out loud?”
Editing saved searches
“Imagine you found where all your saved searches are but wanted to remove “UX Design” from saved searches. Can you walk me through what you would do and talk about it out loud?”
What we found
Most of it worked. Four moments didn’t.
Certain flows needed better direction, results were hard to tell apart, and there was room to improve.
What worked
- Navigation felt intuitive and easy to follow
- Search and filter functionality was clear
- Saving a search was discoverable
What needed improvement
- “Your” subpage was hard to find right away
- Filtered results were confusing to tell apart
- Editing and saving felt too similar to tell apart
- Users could only leave the typing menu with the Return key
Every one of these surfaced before development, so each could be fixed with a relatively small design change.
High fidelity
So we simplified.
We simplified language and actions to keep users moving forward, added signifiers so results were easy to tell apart, and went through several rounds of iteration.
Font
Mulish
Colour, 60 / 30 / 10
Reflection & next steps
Students didn’t only need answers. They needed people.
We set out to organize information. What students were really missing was access to people and their lived experiences.
The three needs from research, now three features in one app.
Research often reveals a different problem
We first believed students mainly needed better information. Research showed they also needed access to people and lived experiences.
Information alone doesn’t create confidence
Students relied on conversations with peers, alumni and advisors to validate their decisions. Connection matters as much as content.
Testing early prevented larger problems later
Usability testing exposed labeling and navigation issues before development, so we could improve clarity with relatively small design changes.
Where I’d go next
Three directions I’d take it
Test with more, and different, students
Run more usability testing with a larger, more diverse group, including prospective students outside UT. And find a way to measure confidence, and how connecting with alumni and students raises it.
Follow the whole decision
Choosing a major can take months, so evaluate how people use the platform over an extended period rather than a single session.
Keep the information right
Work with advisors and departments so the information stays accurate and up to date.