How university students track progress in clinics and how do they define their interest in clinics for their next internship?
This was a 2-week project where we rearchitected the Plan of study for students. The team consisted of myself, a product manager, business analyst, and 5 engineers. We will be shipping the feature in April 2020 for clients. This case study focuses on student tracking progress in internships based on learning activities as per the expectation set by universities and setting up their interest in clinics to specialize in their field of study.
The problem
In 2014, we introduced a feature called ‘My placement’ where the student would see a list of all the internships associated with a clinic for a given time period based on the student’s interest.
Every university defines internship dates for an entire year based on which students have to submit their list of interested clinics. University places students at different clinics where students are expected to complete learning activities. Students faced difficulties in tracking their overall progress in current clinics that they are working with as well as an overview of how their growth has been throughout their clinical year.
Initial exploration and research
We had a few days to explore and research different directions to display track progress of students in a clinic. We started by interviewing our students to understand how they track progress in clinics and how do they define their interest in clinics. We asked questions like: What do you look for in order to know if you have understood the progress in a clinic? What are the problem areas in current features? These are some of our high-level findings:
Students wanted a view showcasing an abstract view of all the internships - All the completed, currently placed and upcoming internships where the students would be working
Students were not able to identify pending tasks for their upcoming internships -Before beginning the internship, there are certain competencies that students need to complete. These activities have not been evident due to which student was not to plan their deadlines.
For submitting their interest of clinics for future internship dates, students had to submit in different navigation- As university established different internship dates, a student has to submit a list of interesting sites in order for the university to do the placement.
We found out that every internship had a different learning activity criterion which were tied to internship dates which were used to evaluate the competency of a student.
In parallel to ‘My placements’, the student used the ‘Wishlist’ feature to submit their interest in clinics for their future internship dates which were similar to the ‘My placements’ internship dates.
This is an early prototype I worked on to showcase how all these might work together:
At the same time, we explored some conceptual directions. In this one, we thought it would be fun if internship progress is shown in a carousel component which helps a student to see all the internship along with upcoming tasks at a glance!
Narrowing scope
After this first round of exploration and research, we wanted to hone in on a direction to tackle first. The plan of study is complicated, and we had so many different concepts. To help us decide, we showed a series of wireframes to 5 students and had them rank the effectiveness of each one.
In each of these examples, we tried different layouts and concepts in order to come up with different solutions.
What the student liked was:
Quick understanding of current internship to-do activities that need to be done
A timeline view of all the clinics throughout the year
All the future due items are upfront
Feedback
At this point, we pulled in the engineers and started building. We recruited an initial pilot group of 5 students. Each week, we sent out a survey asking students to reflect on the new Plan of study feature and conducted short interviews with 2-3 students to get their reflections.
Here's a summary of the rest of their feedback:
I like that I can see the current internship that I am working on without clicking on the internship details every time.
I like that I can easily find what I need to work on.
Different use of colors helps me in understanding the distinction of placements.
I wish I could be able to explore sites before I share my interest in the site that I want to work with.
I wish the information is easy to read from the first glance
We changed a few small things before launching including adding badges and icons for easier readability, creating different scenarios in order to showcase the full effectiveness of the design.
What we shipped
After conducting many user interviews and focused group meetings with internal stakeholders, we felt really confident about launching this to 100% of our users for user conferences. This was our final design.
What’s next?
We want to continue exploring ways to make a plan of study better for students, but this would involve a major strategy shift on many teams. In the future, we're going to explore more ways of incorporating different domain disciplines and featuring better analytics for students to navigate towards action.
Comments