Needs Analysis

Conducting user research and engaging with members of the BOW community

Phase Overview

In this phase, our team created a design brief which built onto our Project Brief by including information that was backed by interviews and surveys we sent out. We also created several design artifacts to synthesize our findings and to support our design choices.

Design Brief

Overview

The BOW Project Marketplace is intended to help BOW students who want to connect with each other to foster a stronger sense of community. Right now, there isn't an easy way to learn about activities happening at other schools; the BOW Project Marketplace will provide an easier way for students to join projects and student groups at other colleges.

The Problem

With our team composed of Olin and Babson students, we relate about the lack of a sense of community between all three schools. With the desire to solve this problem, we have these objectives in mind:

  • Help project seekers and creators within the BOW community find the knowledge they need for their projects to be successful.
  • Create a digital platform for BOW students to see what projects/startups everyone is working on or find students with certain skill sets/experience to fill in certain roles.
  • Students within the BOW community who are looking for a project to work on, whether it be to discover their interests or work on something they're passionate about.

    • After completing these objectives, B Tree S hopes to help the BOW community develop friendships and connections through collaboration on projects.

    The User Group

    Our target group are undergraduate BOW students who are interested in interacting more with students at other BOW colleges through clubs and working on single semester to multi semester long projects. These BOW students are looking to join a project while they are in college to work on specific skills and explore projects in various areas not limited to engineering or business. We want to design for students who feel restricted or intimidated by the current available methods to collaborate, the activation energy required to look for opportunities, and the ways people communicate across colleges. Our platform will help project leaders provide opportunities for interested students to join their project, whether it is still in the concept phase or if it is an existing team that's looking to recruit new members and skills.

    Our Info Collection Plan

    During the User Inquiry phase, we sent a survey to BOW students, got 68 responses, and conducted 10 follow-up interviews. For the surveys, we included spectrum questions to collect quantitative data that could be displayed through graphs (see Needs Analysis).

    We also included open-ended questions to get a better understanding of our user-group and who would/wouldn’t use the Project Marketplace. For our interviews, we interviewed a strong mix of Olin, Babson, and Wellesley students, including both people working on outside-of-class projects and people who don't. Some initial questions we asked depended on if they worked on an outside project

  • e.g. if they work on an outside project, we ask what it is, how many students from other BOW schools are on the team, how they find people to recruit for their projects
  • e.g. if they don't work on an outside project, we ask if they are actively seeking to work on projects or if they are interested in knowing what other BOW students are working on.

    • We also made sure to ask for consent if we could follow up with them for future interviews.

    Limitations to Our Info Collection Plan

  • Our questions and info collection method was prone to response bias, where respondents during our interview could have felt pressured to give certain responses. For example: Respondents saying they would use our product because it's the “socially acceptable” response and they don't want to disappoint us during the interview. For questions like this, an anonymous survey where no information is collected on the respondents could provide more reliable data.
  • Although we had a mix of Olin, Babson, and Wellesley students, there was definitely a large skew in the number of Olin students as part of our sample population. Having such a skew in our sample population has definitely impacted the validity of our data.
  • We also did not account for the different majors of the students we interviewed, such as how at Wellesley, the students at the Foundry are much more likely to be STEM majors (which they were), meaning we were not getting a wide variety of perspectives (such as seeing what English majors think of our project).

    • Needs Analysis

    Website Structure

    Using common themes from our design inspirations, we created a barebones summary of our website structure. As shown below, we plan to have four tabs/links in our navigation bar: Browse Projects, List a Project, About, and Login or Signup. We have not decided whether the Login or Signup and List a Project elements will look more like buttons or tabs, but we do know that we will need them as to lead the user to other pages.

    Figure 1: Website architecture outline

    Interest level response breakdown

    In this design artifact, we deconstructed the survey responses to the question, “How interested are you in joining projects that students are working on at other colleges?” We also included the responses that detailed why the survey respondants rated their interest levels the way they did. This helped us get a sense of why our users would or would not be interested in joining project teams across the BOW community.

    Figure 2: Interest Level Breakdown

    Personas

    Based on our interviewees, we also created 3 different user personas.

    Figure 3: Aleesha the Wellesley student

    Figure 4: Fin the Babson student

    Figure 5: Ella the Olin student

    Impact

    • BOW students will no longer have to only rely on a decentralized way of communicating such as word-of-mouth to find partners with skill sets they need.
      • Olin students who want serious or fun projects won't have to venture out to meet new people and can instead find projects or clubs to join from the comfort of their phone or laptop.
      • Wellesley students can join fun projects or clubs before taking the shuttle to Babson or Olin.
      • Babson students who are trying to find serious projects with possible cofounders from interdisciplinary backgrounds of BOW will be able to within a close proximity of Babson.
    • The BOW Project Marketplace will foster a better sense of community between all schools.
      • Olin students will realize there are business opportunities by working on projects with Babson who want serious project partners and Wellesley students who want fun projects in liberal arts.
    • Project creators and seekers will not have to rely on paying strangers with skill sets they don't have to help them complete projects, instead building their network in the greater BOW community while also being able to learn and grow with other students on the project.

    Solution Requirements

    • Our solution will minimize the current barriers to collaboration and communication between the BOW campuses by allowing existing school clubs to enter the platform, and by serving as a tool to help teams form and share their identity with others, similar to how AngelList.com serves the startup community, when recruiting for projects. Additionally, the contact info (phone # and email) of members in clubs and projects will be provided on the app to help BOW students have concrete communication/collaboration tools.
    • By the BOW Project Marketplace acting as an angel list for school projects and clubs, students casually looking to join projects (one semester long) or clubs won't be deterred from long-term commitment.
    • Multi-device presence with phones, pcs, and macs so the BOW Project Marketplace can reach as many devices as possible.

    Limitations and shortcomings

    • Lack of interest in the Project Marketplace; Project Marketplace benefits from the networking effect where it offers a better service relative to the growth of the userbase (more users makes it easier to connect with other BOW students, but the service is entirely useless without a high quantity users).
    • No business model, the project would have to be funded since the Project Marketplace will not have paywalls or advertisements (too little site traffic to generate any sort of revenue).

    Effort Distribution

    We all worked on writing up the project brief and brainstorming the survey / interview questions. Claire and Zoe focused on reaching out and conducting follow-up interviews to Olin students who filled out the survey, and James and Julian did interviews for Babson students. Shash helped us connect to 2 Wellesley students at the Foundry.