UT Wayfinder+ Project

Wayfinder is the default tool recommended by the University of Texas at Austin for major information and guidance resources. Introduced to all new students during orientation, and housed under the School of Undergraduate Studies, Wayfinder is a tool meant to help students when they are unsure of their major options.

Role: UX Researcher & Designer

Challenge

83% of UT students change their major at least once and 43% change their majors two or more times according to the UT Austin 2020 Impact Report, making the demand for a simplified internal transfer process extremely high. While the exisiting Wayfinder tool is an information hub for students to access resources, it lacks guiding tools that allow students to visualize and compare between majors.

Existing Experience

The current quizzes Wayfinder provides do not provide any action items for students to proceed upon since their current quizzes only display the user's top 5 traits in each category (values, interest, personality, and skills) without providing insight or synthesis on corresponding and suitable majors.

Students are also unable to access comparison tools or interact with degree plans.

How Wayfinder+ Can Help

Proposed Wayfinder+ will include reputable personality/ career quizzes for students to find majors that are specific to their college and are suitable to them, and Wayfinder+’s degree planning tools will combine information from different degree plans to allow students to quickly compare coursework required for different majors. Using this comparison tool, students will be able to take a closer look at the nuances between different majors to determine which is best suited towards their interests and goals. Since Wayfinder+ allows students to review requirements for each major, this comparison tool will also allow students to make a decision based on the time required to complete each major based on their completed courses and existing credit hours. This can be accomplished with interactive links to the University of Texas’s Interactive Degree Audit (IDA).

User Research

8 initial interviews were conducted to further understand UT students' familiarity with the Wayfinder tool and their thoughts on our proposed features. Additionally, we asked about personal factors which impacted their major selection and the resources they use when researching this information. Research participants were chosen based on these criteria:

  • Diverse grade levels
  • Diverse cultural background
  • Previous interest in transferring majors
  • Current undergraduate UT Austin student
8 additional interviews were conducted for usability testing using our low fidelity prototypes

Research Questions & Interviews
Analysis
Findings
  • It is difficult to compare information between majors
  • participants thought the proposed features such as the career quiz would be beneficial
  • Wayfinder, as it is now, needs improvement
Final Feature Concepts



Feature Descriptions

Our final concepts for prototyping were decided through a second phase of group ideation modeled after Disney's Creativity Strategy.

Usability Testing

Overarching Goals

  • Understand whether or not this tool is helpful for students when transferring
  • Find out how Wayfinder+ could be modified for ease of use
  • Determine which features are the most and least helpful
The users that we plan on recruiting as participants of these Think-Alouds are a similar demographic to that which we investigated during our research interviews. Ideal participants will be UT Austin students with some amount of experience or interest in transferring majors. They will navigate through our prototype based on the Wayfinder UT Austin major assessment tool.

Usability Testing Script
Low Fidelity Prototype
Participant Responses

Closing

Findings
Next Steps

  • Redesign screens using user feedback
  • Integrate External Planning Tools such as Google Calendar
  • Add more context to action items

Presentation Slides