Purdue UX Learning Studio 2 Fall 2024
Tuan Nguyen | Ryan Jo | Renee Hsu | Avery Dellinger III
We all know how chaotic being at Purdue gets sometimes. The night before a major assignment is due, students would anxiously write last-minute emails to their professors or TAs, and refresh their inboxes for last-minute instructions. Meanwhile, TAs and faculty scramble to respond to urgent questions buried in an avalanche of unrelated messages. Communication across campus feels less like a flow and more like a maze, with slow responses, miscommunication, and critical information often lost amid a tangle of fragmented channels, notifications, and platform inconsistencies. This chaotic system not only disrupts the learning experience but also drains time and energy from everyone involved. It’s clear that in a digital age where timely communication can make or break academic success, Purdue’s current setup needs a smarter, more streamlined solution—one that not only delivers messages effectively but also prioritizes what matters most.
The goal of this project was to create a responsive web experience that tackles specific communication issues within Purdue’s academic community. Our objective was to design a seamless communication platform for Purdue faculty, TAs, and students, integrating cross-platform messaging, message tracking, and improved accessibility. We aimed to develop user-centered solutions by incorporating feedback from co-design activities and secondary research to address communication barriers and promote engagement within the academic environment.
Before we develop the solution, research is an essential step to lay the proper groundwork. We need to understand the communication challenges faced by Purdue faculty, TAs, and students. Through user research and workshops, we will identify user needs, pain points, and current communication workflows, generating the insights necessary for potential design solutions.
In addition to in-depth, qualitative interviews about their challenges and experiences regarding communication channels, we conducted extensive co-design workshops with Purdue staff and TAs to gather insights into their communication habits and difficulties. These workshops involved exercises that “mimic” the faculty’s real time experience with fielding messages from students from various commonly used platforms in Purdue (Slack, Outlook, and Teams). In addition, secondary research was conducted to understand best practices in communication platforms and identify potential features that could improve user experience.
The research revealed that communication at Purdue is fragmented across multiple platforms, causing confusion, delays, and lost messages. Faculty and TAs expressed frustration with having to navigate different interfaces for Slack, Outlook, and Teams. Many users also struggled to manage notifications effectively, leading to missed or delayed responses, particularly for urgent matters. Furthermore, users valued the ability to customize their notification settings but found it challenging to do so within the current system.
With the AI feature recommendation generated during the co-design phase of Project 2, the goal of the research activity was to identify feasible methods for implementing the AI assistance feature.
The team conducted a literary analysis focusing mainly on text classification capability of Artificial Intelligence.