PROBLEM

Inclusive Impact aims to connect with underrepresented members of the College Park community.

The University of Maryland Inclusive Impact Initiative aims to support economic impact by providing opportunities in the College Park area. The initiatives include career development, family and employment, entrepreneurship, healthcare, sustainable housing, and transportation resources for community members. The Inclusive Impact program is a program at the University of Maryland that aims to connect with the College Park community by providing a full-stack website containing resources and program information that is catered to help members of the community looking for resources. The Inclusive Impact phase III team wants to deploy a website on Heroku and Amazon S3. Then, gather information by conducting user interviews to check for any gaps in user experience.

GOALS

  1. Website that is functional and available to all of its users

  2. One place for all the information that they need

  3. Take into account underrepresented minority groups and their needs


SOLUTION

Community website giving updates on upcoming community events around the College Park area

When it comes to thinking about individuals and families around the college park area, most have access to a computer. This could be at a public space or they own a device themselves, but having a website would be more accessible than a mobile app due to families that don't have mobile devices. This website would incorporate the mission/goals of Inclusive Impact and provide financially struggling members of the community to access resources they need.

USER INTERVIEWS

Majority of times my users were looking for a more cohesive events calendar where they can access everything easily…

I noticed that there is a huge need for a working calendar that can easily display all the potential events that a user would be interested in attending. My team conducted 8 interviews with community members that are passionate about seeing a further development in how the community connects together. I have asked the following questions to note how users are interacting with the website and whether we are at a point where our resources are going to benefit the users’ needs.

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Research Questions:

  1. Tell me about yourself and your day-to-day work life in terms of your method of transportation and family commitments?

  2. After clicking through the website, was there anything confusing that you need more clarification on?

  3. Was there a program that you took interest in? Do you think this program will be beneficial for you, how so?

  4. Did you find yourself exploring other programs that were surprising? If so, what categories were these programs in?

  5. If you weren’t able to find any resources that relate to your needs, what would you hope to see more of?

TESTING + IMRPOVEMENTS

3 major improvements in my design 

Based on 8 interviews of individuals from all backgrounds, I started to iterate through several designs with my team. We wanted to incorporate what users were looking forward most on to on the website. After 3-4 weeks of researching and discussing with our clients, we made these three changes.

Single Calendar​

  • Based on user interviews, it's more time efficient to look at a singular calendar than flipping through multiple calendars

  • More importantly, it's more accessible to find when all resources/events are incorporated into website.

Language Barriers

  • Some of our interviewees noted that they aren't fluent in English

  • We researched the most popular languages around the CP area and incorporated those into our website

  • Descriptive Resources

  • Users wanted more information on each resource card instead of clicking through each one individually

  • Our goal is to have enough and useful resources for our users to find exactly what they are looking for. 


DESIGN

PHASE III

Since this was an ongoing project, there had been many previous works and discussions made that my team had to pick up and one important part would be the website design. We were given the freedom to suggest or change any designs and I had initially thought about how this would play out in a mobile app. After further thought on how much this project has developed, our team decided to stick with the website because it will be in the future connected to the University as a resource. Furthermore, a website is more accessible to users as not every family has access to a mobile device whereas computers are more readily available to the public.

CONCLUSION

If I were given the opportunity to continue this project, I would…

  1. Improve design implementation - new designs for the wireframes including images that correlate to the programs

  2. More individual resources - accompany with short event/program descriptions to each card

  3. Integrated filters - relevant geographic areas that relate to where our users are going to be