Team 4for$4: Benjamin Frailey, Andy Chu, Enyu Li
Time Frame: 1 Month, April of 2019
Project Brief: Our goal was to create an experience during Purdue’s orientation week (BGR) that would help start the idea of college socialization within those incoming freshmen. It was not to necessarily turn them into social butterflies, but to get them more comfortable socializing in this new environment.
Documentation:
Download it HERE
Scope
We decide to focus on the topic of sense of belonging and started with our mantra: “cultivate a more comfortable campus”. We did a number of primary research and learned more context regarding BGR, from our interview with LGBTQ center on-campus we were able to focus our user group to incoming LGBTQ+ freshmen. This included many interviews, from students and even LGBTQ+ organizations on campus. Also, from our secondary research, we learned about sex positivity and sexual awareness among student on campus; then with helpful feedbacks about changes regarding sexual awareness can be sensitive and uncomfortable for some, we narrowed the problem scope to provide a more comfortable campus by making LGBTQ+ resource more accessible instead of more tangible solution such as STD testing or a “condom run” for sexual awareness.
From here, we created a main idea for our solution: Make sure incoming freshmen who are LGBTQ+ aware of the information and help provided by LGBTQ center such as mentor, student group, and STD testing information.
Research
As mentioned above, we did a lot of research in the form of interviews for this project. I think this was very fitting because this scope had a lot of nuances and dealt with making people feel comfortable interacting with others. I felt strongly about this, and led a lot of the interviewing. I interviews gay, trans, and other LGBTQ+ people I knew, as well as talking with the Purdue LGBTQ Center to see what they thought of our design and problems they had faced before during BGR. A few things I learned from this was that Purdue has in the past tried to have better LGBTQ+ representation and resources during BGR, but backlash from parents who had heard that their kids had been exposed to this prevented the LGBTQ and other queer organizations from being able to utilize BGR. This added a lot of nuance to our project, and was something we kept in mind for the final design. From queer students I found out that many wanted to know how friendly Purdue’s campus was towards queer people and topics, and get real advice on where they might not feel safe from someone they trust and preferable has their own experience with being queer at Purdue.
Main Solution
Our solution had a few hurdles to get over. It had to be something that would not cause a ruckus among the parents who did not want their kids exposed to LGBTQ+ topics during orientation, a backlash Purdue already faces. At the same time, we had to make this available to freshman who might be questioning, already know they are queer but are closeted, or those who are just not comfortable being queer on Purdue’s campus yet. This meant we need to make it nearly and underground, yet school sponsored idea. It also needed to be safe for freshman to use. All of this combined made for a very interesting scope and idea, which made our designing very engaging.
With this came the idea of an app that connected incoming freshman to already trained BGR team leaders. Queer team leaders would sign up to be a part of this program, and would get assigned multiple mentees through the week as freshmen found out about this app. We chose TL’s because the school could keep them accountable so it was safe for the freshmen, and they already had training talking to freshman. Mentees would be able to semi anonymously (given generated anonymous user names) message these queer mentors to ask them about thier own experiences at Purdue, what parts of Purdue are most queer friendly, and ask about things like the LGBTQ+ center. This would allow these freshman a safe way to get more comfortable on campus, and give them a queer connection within Purdue.
Final Prototype
Leadership
This project was my first real taste of leadership within UX. One of our team members sadly had to leave the class during this project cycle, and the team was left without direction. I ended up stepping up and doing a lot of the leadership for this project, and I morphed it into something I was very passionate about. This scope made it very easy for me to feel like a leader, and made this project very enjoyable to work on. I did a lot of the sketching, many of the interviews, and was able to inject a new format into the documentation where we included checkups on how are team was feeling and out motivations at certain times of the project. I really liked this and though it added a lot to the narrative. This would be something I later implemented in later documentation.
Reflection
This was probably my favorite project of the semester. I got to take a leadership role and had a lot of fun with it. We did have a messy start, especially with defining our scope and what we wanted out of our final idea, but I think the re scoping was worth it and the team came together to make something really impactful in the end. I learned a lot from this project, especially about the effect passion for a cause can have on your work ethic. The subject matter of our scope was something important to me, and I could feel that impacting how I worked on this project. This might be why I feel very proud of our final design, it was something I could see myself using during my own BGR experience.
Benjamin's portfolio 