About

This project was performed during a 24 hour hackathon than UC Davis hosts yearly called Hack Davis. I served as the project manager and product designer for this project and worked alongside Gennifer Hom, Caden Newman, and Steve Chen. We were tasked with the prompt of creating an application for Davis students.

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Challenge

This prompt made us consider how as students achieving our tech career goals, we struggle to find internship opportunities through the current UC Davis resources. From our condensed research, we found that other students feel anxious about the career search process due to the lack of individualized help. Handshake is a resource used by many Davis students, but it is an external rather than internal tool that does not tackle students’ experiences with the school community.

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User Research

Although we had very limited time to develop this application, we knew it would be very important to conduct user research beforehand. We performed literature reviews to ensure we would be well informed about any current struggles and other competing platforms. We also created user personas based off of students we interviewed.

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Pain Points

Due to the short time frame, we focused our solution on the mentee's perspective.

Dashboard: giving a general overview of the student’s profile, their badges/achievements, saved jobs, and progress regarding their exercises.

Careers page: a search filter to provide students with the most relevant opportunities and internships.

Connect page: where students can schedule weekly meetings with their matched UC Davis Alumni mentor of the month and keep track of their attendance (promoting accountability)

Matching with mentors & Chat feature: Mentor and mentees fill out a survey to help determine the most compatible match. They enter a chat room where a timer counts down within each reply either party sends that mimics a real-time conversation.

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Features we couldn’t implement, but plan to integrate

Exercises page: students can have fun with interactive games relevant to their tech interest that helps them improve their hard skills

Networking page: Mentors publicly post opportunities to connect mentees for relationships or future referrals for their company

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Ideation

‍Using these main takeaways, we were able to start affinity mapping and forming HMW questions to guide our solutions and sketches in the next phase.

Mid-fi prototyping

We developed a very simplistic, clean and minimal design system for Elementee. We also created a set of universal assets to use within our designs.

Our finalized mid-fi screens:

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Hi-fi prototyping

We used React.js as our core technology to implement CSS, HTML, and javascript in a cohesive way. We followed an AGILE development format to focus on building the core functionalities of our app. We were able to find a balance between design and development, making sure not to overly emphasize one facet of our app over the other. As a result, we created an app with good design and functionality.

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Takeaways

Through the User Research phase, we learned plenty about how UC Davis students struggle during the job search process and specific pain points that we worked on tackling in our prototype. We enjoyed hearing about students’ unique experiences and wanted to do our part to address their needs. From the overall experience, we worked on our communication skills to streamline our workflow and get the most work done between the designers and developers.

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Next Steps

We want to prototype our platform further by conducting further research with the UC Davis student body, fleshing out more animations in Figma, and implementing additional pages and features where students can perform educational, engaging exercises.