DePaul Now
Aiming to bridge the gap for prospective students unable to visit campus
Overview:
DePaul University has a diverse mix of commuter and out-of-state students. Visiting the campus is challenging for those far away, especially since the pandemic. This project offers an online experience that showcases DePaul’s campus, making it accessible to prospective students who can’t visit in person. Completed in a group of three, we all contributed to the research, user interviews/testing, and design.
Research
We started this project with research to better get an understanding of our target audience. We asked students a range of questions to better understand what influences them when it comes to choosing a college. This helped us find our target audience as well as start to understand what their needs are.
Insight #1 - College is Expensive
The biggest thing on students' minds was cost which as we know has skyrocketed and become the main hurdle to accessing higher education. For this project we are more focused on the other influences on students when picking a school. We did anticipate this beforehand with the interviewing and focused on the other areas that influenced students for our solution.
Insight #2 - Influenced by Campus
Our second insight we gleaned from our research was prospective students and current were influenced in their college choice by a campus visit in person or virtual. This with the combination of what we just all experienced during the pandemic proves that there was a real need to see the campus in some way when it came to choosing your college.
Insight #3 - Important Influences
From our interviews we compiled data of the most important influences to students when choosing their college. The most important besides cost were location, campus culture, housing, programs and majors offered, along with housing.
View All
From these key points/insights we realized the importance of campus tours as well as the many other factors that students are considering and wanted. We wanted to create an experience for students that wasn’t just another virtual or video tour but also incorporate some of the other things students were influenced by.
Prototyping
We started our prototyping by creating a potential map of the organizational structure we wanted within the app and task flows. After that we moved onto low fidelity prototyping with hand drawn wireframes. Then we took those hand drawn wireframes and made higher fidelity versions in Figma of them.
Solution
Our final prototype contains an interactive map for students to navigate around and learn more about campus and what the school has to offer. Students are able to tap on a building and learn more about programs, housing, courses, and more depending on the building they selected.
Figma Prototype