Supporting Multiculturalism in a Student Community
The brief: in a group of five to use human-centred design to develop a new way to support, empower, or change the behaviour of a group around a shared area of interest (i.e. a community). Deliverables: a written report, a demo video (shown below) and a poster.
This project was the first project undertaken in the MSc. It involves extensive group work with a new and diverse group of course mates, utilising a variety of user research and interaction design techniques. Group members came from China, Singapore and the UK, and possessed a wide range of backgrounds: Psychology, Computer Science, and Design. My role in the group revolved around my experience in market research and in psychology - so that I took a leadership role in discussions around user research and analysis, while also contributing heavily to design-related stages of the work.
We chose to work within the community of Goodenough College (a postgrad accommodation provider), researching and ideating a system to inspire, encourage and support multiculturalism through regular one-on-one contact. Similar to activities played at stamp exhibitions, students are urged to 'collect' countries to light up a personal world map, by having 1:1 meetings with community members from new countries.
Demo video. The user journey - submitted to CHI Student Design Competition 2018.
Poster (excerpt). Summary of the user journey.
Establishing Requirements
To build a design case for our project, we conducted auto-ethnography and qualitative research on students and stakeholders. This gave us an understanding of community life at the College and and helping us to identify needs that can be solved with human-centred design.
Through our research, we uncovered a need for deeper empathy between students from differing cultures, mediated by levels of introversion and available time to socialise.
The problem was operationalised into one statement: How might we design a digital intervention that will inspire empathy between different cultural groups through interpersonal contact, whilst being sensitive to the time and energy constraints of postgraduate students?
Qualitative Interviews. Semi-structured interviews conducted at Goodenough College with students and the Dean and Registrar.
Affinity Diagrams; Discussion. Findings were organised thematically; discussion centred around the needs and constraints of the community.
2x2 matrix; Personas. Interviewees were organised by their constraints to socialising - introversion and time. This helped us in designing personas to colour in the design space.
Initial Design
We began the design process by gathering as many ideas as possible, and developing them internally to generate a minimum viable product.
Based on the criteria of feasibility, innovation and effectiveness, the ideas were narrowed down to five alternatives around three themes: A. an interactive map, B. culture exchange meet-ups and C. public selfie screens.
10x10. Rapid idea generation - Each team member contributed multiple ideas and alternatives to solve the design problem.
Internal discussion. Further development and iteration of ideas through group discussion.
Concept Testing
The five ideas were tested quantitatively among students. Two ideas - Friendship Map and Culture Merchant - were deemed the most promising for further development.
Quantitative Survey. Concept testing to help us narrow down the most relevant ideas for the community.
Quantitative Results. The two top ideas - Friendship Map and Culture Merchant had complementary strengths and weaknesses.
Note: Due to the tight time constraints of our project, we had only managed to obtain a sample of 22 participants - less than ideal, but enough to give us an indicative direction for design.
Friendship Map. Relatively stronger in attracting participation, but less able to push intercultural dialogue.
Culture Merchant. Relatively stronger in pushing intercultural dialogue, but less able to attract participation.
Parallel Prototyping
We bolstered the quantitative data with qualitative findings from parallel prototyping.
The combined qualitative and quantitative research showed that the two ideas could be combined into one system; the Friendship Map could be used as a public artefact for students to interact with, pulling them into the more action-oriented Culture Exchange system.
Friendship Map - Digital Prototype. Vertical prototype to showcase the user journey. We guided three students through the experience of answering messages and meeting new people.
Culture Merchant - Digital Prototype. Vertical prototype to showcase the user journey. We guided three students through the experience of arranging to meet someone new.
Evaluation
Light Up Your World combines the two ideas of Friendship Map and Culture Merchant. Further brainstorming on the possibilities of RFID tagging gave us the idea of linking the activities on Culture Merchant back to the Friendship Map, so that meet ups can be validated with student cards.
We ran guided evaluations to understand how easily the system can integrate into student life and to uncover usability issues. Reception to the prototype was positive, while some usability issues were highlighted and fixed before submission of the project.
Light Up Your World - Digital Prototype. Vertical prototype to showcase the user journey. We guided students in using the prototype, allowing them to test out individual features of the system. Role-playing was also used in helping students to visualise the RFID portions of the user experience.
Evaluation and Usability tests. We evaluated the prototype with students, as well as the Dean and the Registrar.
Limitations and Next Steps
Light Up Your World presents a gamified system to motivate students to meet new people from different cultures. As such, there is potential for the template to be used in larger multicultural communities.
The success of Light Up Your World should be measured in an expansion in the cultural diversity of friendship groups, and an increase in personal knowledge of different cultures; with quantitative pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys.
However, we felt we could have done more to increase motivation to continue with the game. Currently, users are motivated by the novelty of the system, the possibility of meeting someone new, and the reward from seeing the map light up. Further progress within our MSc course got us to think about using advanced gamification features to spur activity, such as rewards and badges for meeting a certain number of new people, or the creation of system-wide social events (e.g. Lunch with your Light Up Your World friends) to link 1:1 meetings with the larger community.