Goal Tritons
Product Design
Provide UCSD students guidance on their career-approaching journey
Duration
On Going
Role
Product Design Lead
Tools
Figma
Problem
Due to a theoretical-leaning curriculum, many UCSD underclassmen students lack experience in hands-on career training and access to career-approaching resources. For international students, their experience is further complicated by working status and authorizations as well as cultural and language barriers. Therefore, the Chinese Computer Community at UCSD aims to provide a curation of resources and guidance for students to approach their career with more clarity and confidence.
Research
Survey
We devised a survey and distributed it to our peers to find out about their general experience with career-approaching and potential roadblocks in the categorized process.
Safety
Amongst respondents that express that they are not sure at all or unsure about their career path, Junior students display the highest percentage: 35.71%, preceding Sophomore and Senior students who display an equal percentage: 28.71%. On the other hand, amongst respondents that express that they are sure or very sure about their career path, Junior and Senior students display the highest percentage: 36.36%, while Sophomore students display the lowest percentage: 9.09%. Concluding from this, Junior and Sophomore students express a more negative attitude towards their career path.
Affordability
" Doing what people recommend but not sure if I’m approaching it right..."
"It's almost impossible to get into healthcare in the US as an int'l student. Very frustrating. "
Some wants & desires:
Information about available jobs for undergrads in my area of study
Information that would help those that don’t have experience for internship
information regarding their hiring rate of international students
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People who can help me to determine my future career goal
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Interviews
To probe specific pain points from these topics, we then conducted one-to-one interviews to first understand their perspectives in depth, and secondly to receive feedback on our ideas in forms of storyboards. From the seven interviews, we selected the following storyboards:
AI Chatbot Assistance to Create a Judgement-Free Environment
6 out of 7 interviewees supported our solution of using an AI chatbot to create a judgment-free environment. We noted similarities between their reactions in which they felt leveraging AI would create a sense of safety, acceptance, and even understanding.
As one interviewee said,
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“It creates a safe space for people to explore what they want to do. The biggest thing is feeling safe and having the freedom to explore.”
Interactive Mental Health Education Lessons
6 out of 7 interviewees support these solutions because they would encourage others to provide more informed support and normalize mental health conditions.
“More exposure, more normalization.”
Testing
Landing Page AB Testing
After analyzing the interview transcripts, we decoded the following common themes. Combining with the above selected storyboards, we ideate a solution structure:
​We found an opportunity to pivot and combine AI, education, and community because both our AI idea and a community feature have the potential to meet the needs of our stakeholders, where AI would be utilized as a non-judgmental assistant for education and bond-building.
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One question thus raises:
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Would mental health patients be comfortable using an app that both serves as a personal space (education) to learn about mental health and as a social space (community) to connect with others?
We wanted to understand if our competitors only offered education because people preferred to separate personal and social services.To explore this, we tested two service ideas:
AI + Education vs. AI + Education + Community
Through Google Adwords web probes, we found that the AI + Education + Community landing page actually has a much higher conversion rate when accounting for the conversions generated by ads alone, meaning our riskiest and unique selling point has promise and we will thus focus on this concept.
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Concierge MVP Testing
Next, we conducted MVP testing with two early adopters to test the AI + education + community idea with the following questions and a minimum viable prototype:
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What do people think about interacting with an AI? How comfortable they are with opening up to the AI?
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What do they think about getting matched with others using AI?
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How comfortable they are with talking to others they’ve just met?
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What do they think about AI-facilitated lessons?
“I liked that, I feel like it’s a simple idea but it has a strong possible, outcomes that could come from it.”
According to the testing results, we refined our core features such as specifying interests in the friend-matching feature, adding gamification in the interactive lessons to improve motivation etc.
Solution
Finally, after MVP iterations and final competitive analysis & value flow analysis, we designed our app MindBud with four major features:
Takeaways
Designing for a group like the mental health community requires extensive research, a range of toolsets to help deal with the pre-existing conditions, and an empathetic and attentive heart for others. It pushes me to abandon my predispositions and really re-examine and reconsider the group, their difficulties, and how we could really help them with a combination of people and technology approaches.
Other Works
Rhino, 3D Printing, Arduino, Silicone Casting
Credit to my teammates: Marmot Bao. Tong Yuan