Crafting the Backpack

Checkout how we built backpack to help HCI students choose elective courses efficiently and improve their satisfaction with the master's program

Note!

This solution is conceptual and was designed as a part of a course assignment in Masters programme in Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University. If you have any queries or wish to discuss about this solution please contact me through any of the social channels listed at the bottom of this page.

Summary

Overview

The ultimate aim of our project was to examine if there were any potential improvements to the process of choosing course electives at the Uppsala HCI program. Selecting courses should be easy and efficient so that students should feel satisfied with the process and the program itself.

The result of our research and design process is Backpack. After user test we found backpack certainly improved the knowledge of students who are going to choose electives.

Project Duration

20th September 2021 - 31st October 2021

Status

Completed

Team

Daniel Peña López
Eliz Fikret
Josef Jönsson
Karthik Venkataraman M
Lauren van Loo

Roles

User Research
UI Design & Prototyping
User Testing

Tools

Figma (Design & Prototyping)
Jamovi (Quantitative Analysis)
Consider.ly (Qualitative Analysis)
DaVinci Resolve (Video Production)

The inspiration for this project came from the process of deciding on future elective courses. Not only did the Uppsala Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) students express dissatisfaction with the process; it was a topic of widespread discussion. We quickly realized that there appeared to be a pressing need to investigate this issue.

Many elective options are introduced in university degrees to give students some flexibility in shaping their programs. Often, the descriptions for these electives are vague, and students do not get to meet the lecturer or alumni who have taken this elective course before the application period closes. Furthermore, there are numerous rules that must be followed when selecting elective courses, many of which are unclear and unknown.

We wanted to help all Uppsala students with our design because we realized they were all using the same system. However, after completing the first couple of course seminars and conducting research to understand the used systems, we realized that we needed to narrow our focus. As a result, this project focuses solely on the HCI program's research and issues. By doing so, we were able to reach out to more relevant people and gain consistent knowledge about the issues that our specific target audience faces when selecting electives.

Project Report

In the project report, we have explained our theoretical background, as well as argued for the methodological decisions taken while gathering data and how the data was analyzed. Furthermore, we have explained how the analyzed data helped us to make informed decisions on how to create our design and how we evaluated the design itself. Finally, we have discussed the pros and cons of our project solution while giving ideas for future improvements.

The project report contains complete details about our methods, design phases, prototypes and user testing results performed during the course of the project.