How can ASU help students overcome food insecurity?
The Problem
Research shows that students suffering from food insecurity are at greater risk of mental and academic struggles. Therefore, our task was to update the ASU dining website to provide students with access to resources. This project focused on discovering how students access information about food and resources at Arizona State University.
How did we do it?
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Research Plan
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Usage Stories
User Personas
Design Sketches & Redesign
Research Plan
The research plan aimed to find ways to gain information about ASU students who attend school in person in order to conduct user testing. The plan outlined how we would find participants and a timeline to complete each step. Because we were remote students gaining access to students who were on-campus presented a challenge. However, we were able to put together a comprehensive plan to identify students on campus and complete surveys and interviews.
Usage Stories
Creating these usage stories was a fun, collaborative assignment. I worked in a group of 4, including myself. We each took on a part in the project and utilized slack for communication and sharing documents.
We created two user stories based on the data gained through surveys and user interviews. My role in this assignment was to take the stories my teammates created and turn them into a visual representation of the user's journey. This project allowed me to consider the user's interactive steps on the site and how they affect the users' emotions. During this assignment, I identified the users' happy areas and areas of pain. In addition, this assignment allowed us to create a story for the user of how the website is used. This enabled us to see how we could improve the pain points for the user.
Usage Story for Bianca
Usage Story for Lucas
User Persona
This assignment demonstrates my understanding of analyzing and articulating information found in our research. The content was created using our knowledge from user surveys and interviews. Because this project focused on understanding students' food insecurities, it was essential to include information about it in the personas. These personas included quantitative and qualitative data to make the user as realistic as possible.
Design Sketches and Redesign
After we had completed the group portion of researching the users, it was time to create a new design. The new design focused on making several critical changes to the current ASU dining website to improve the user experience. The changes included adding content to the homepage for students to find help accessing food. I also added a link in the meal plan navigation menu so that if students could not afford the meal plans, they had access to other resources.
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Finally, a "Need Support" page was added to the current site to allow users to find the information they needed and connect them to local resources in the community. This assignment allowed me to focus on the users' needs and create a user-centered design that met the needs of the students with food insecurities.
