GluClose Buddies
My role:
(User Research Lead, UX/UI designer 1 of 5)
Structuring goals for user research and synthesizing findings to hone in on the key user need.
Coordinating user research interviews and user testing.
Problem Statement:
Prospective students with Type 1 (T1) Diabetes want to smoothly and successfully transition from highschool to college. Currently, many of these students have questions or concerns about transitioning to college, and need that extra support with navigating the next chapter of their lives.
Moving to college can be a fun yet nerve wracking time. In this next chapter of your life as a college student you finally get to experience the independence that comes with moving out of your family home. However, this new freedom can look different for students with Type 1 (T1) diabetes. For many T1 diabetics, college is the first time they are managing their own sugar levels without any help from their family which can create a lot of stress. Not being able to successfully manage their sugar levels can pose very serious health risks; for example, low sugar levels can make students feel lethargic and can affect their ability to study or take an exam.
What is The College Diabetes Network (CDN)?
The College Diabetes Network (CDN) is an organization that aims to help young people with diabetes with this transition to college by providing them with resources and connecting them to peer support. CDN tasked our team with finding a new way to reach and deliver their high-quality content to prospective college students with Type 1 (T1) diabetes. CDN currently has “Off to College” pdf guides to help students; however, not many people download these guides off the website, which limits their impact.
After talking to CDN’s Mission and Community Director, CDN’s optimal outcome was a 2.0 version of the guide that could reach more prospective and current college students.
Square One: The Off to College Guides
Thoughts on the guide compiled after talking to people in the 4 different stakeholder groups: 1) students with T1 diabetes in CDN, 2) students with T1 diabetes not in CDN, 3) prospective students with T1 , and 4) the parents of prospective students
After familiarizing ourselves with CDN’s current guides, my team and I realized that this information was important and needed to reach more students; however, reading the guides was laborious. I wanted to learn more about what stakeholders in the diabetes community thought about these guides through user research.
Even though the information in the guides were helpful to some interviewees and would ease their transition from high school to college, in reality, the guide does not reach many students to be able to actually address their needs.
The guides are too long and not very engaging, which discourages users from downloading it.
And though our CDN client’s optimal outcome was a new and improved Off to College guide, I knew our team could do better than just stepping to “Square Two”.
I kept trying to push my team to consider something broader, and my goal became to structure our research question to hopefully uncover those needs.
Collecting Stories from 4 Stakeholder Groups
I reached out to people from 4 different user groups to gain insights on how to improve CDN’s resources and to not restrict our search too early.
These four groups were:
A Zoom interview with a prospective college student, which I conducted with two of my teammates
Prospective college students with T1 diabetes
College students who are CDN members
College students with T1 diabetes who are not CDN members
Parents of T1 diabetics
We interviewed 2 diabetic prospective college students, 1 current college CDN member, 2 diabetic higher education students who are not CDN members, and 2 parents of students with T1 diabetes.
Goals of User Research Interview by Stakeholder
I outlined the individual research goals for each stakeholder above. The interviews were semi-structured interviews. In some of the interviews, when time permitted, I conducted a review of the “Off to College” guide to get insights about the specifics of the guide.
Synthesizing the User Needs
Hear what our stakeholders had to say
Methods
We did an affinity mapping on Miro (a virtual whiteboard+post-it note website) to sort through our qualitative data and find patterns. We also did an empathy map as a team to really try to understand our user.
Findings
Current CDN members talked about their transition to college, and how they ran into unexpected difficult moments regarding testing accommodations and moving into their dorms. Interestingly, both of these difficult situations were talked about in the “Off To College” guide, and the information would have benefited this student had he read the guide.
One current college student who is not in CDN mentioned her school did not have a CDN chapter, and that having one would have benefitted her. College students that were not in CDN chapters primarily wished they knew how to request test taking accommodations.
Prospective college students want to find a supportive community, and were more eager to apply to colleges that had a CDN chapter.
Parents of type 1 students usually introduced their students to CDN after researching online. They also shared concerns about their child being supported in college and wanted more information about how current college students are successfully managing diabetes on their own.
So what next?
The ideas being thrown around included making the guides into a video or podcast format and creating a chatbot to increase interaction on the website. Another idea was creating a marketing strategy for the guide to increase its reach to its intended audience, but as designers, doing a marketing project would not be catering to our strengths at all.
After talking to our key stakeholders, it made sense to create a platform to aid prospective college students with T1 diabetes to aid them in their transition to college.
We came up with 3 user needs for prospective students:
1. Connecting with an older student who has been through similar experiences
2. Getting answers to quick questions
3. To find a supportive, knowledgeable community in college
Glu-Close Buddies: A Multi Touchpoint Platform
Our solution?
Merging the content in the guides with a mentorship platform to create a support network backed by curated resources!
Prospective College Students can filter through potential mentors
The Off to College Guides are broken down into resource tid-bits
My team and I came up with an idea to merge a mentorship platform with the existing guides CDN has. This platform would connect prospective college students to current college students with T1 diabetes, who could answer questions and provide guidance as well as connect them with a broader community. The Off to College with Diabetes Guides would be broken up into smaller resource articles that will be accessible to mentees and mentors.
Follow up user interviews
After deciding upon creating a mentorship-like platform, I scheduled interviews with another prospective college student and CDN member to get insights for our prototype. These interviews helped us narrow down aspects of the design such as whether or not students would prefer choosing their own mentor or being matched to one, or what qualities they would look for in an ideal mentor or mentee.
““Me and [CDN Chapter President] were actually talking about [a mentor/mentee program]. I just didn’t know how to implement it, nor did I know what resources we had””
““I’m part of mentorship programs… and it’s been really helpful. I think it would be helpful for a lot of us high school students to know what it’s like to be in college, because I’m scared of like ‘oh in the dorms, at night if I go low, how do I talk to my professors about it.’ Obviously I’ve had diabetes for a long time, but I have no idea what it’s like to be on my own.” ”
Through these two interviews, we were able to get insights on what some potential users of the platform envisioned it looking like and get validation that we were heading in the right direction.
User Testing Two Prototypes
I coordinated user tests with four previous user research participants and 2 additional participants, who I got connected to through snowball sampling. We also conducted a co-design workshop with CDN to brainstorm what the platform might look like and how we could measure the platform’s success in the future.
After testing the platform, one user stated:
““I feel like this is something I’ve always wanted to see, and it’s really cool to see it happening. If you ask me, I think once this starts to get out there and people hear about it, it’s going to be really, really big””
Our Final Product, which is now in the process of being implemented!
Our team designed two different prototypes: one for mentors and one for mentees (prospective college students).
Key Features of Glu-Close Buddies:
Filter the Ideal Mentor
Mentees can use filters to narrow down their search for a perfect mentor. The filters include location, gender, college, major, the duration of mentorship, and the number of years since their diagnosis. The filters were created after the workshop with the CDN team and user testing interviews.
Flexible Mentorship Duration
Mentors are able to specify the length of mentorship they are available to provide. Mentees can find a mentor that fits their needs and request a mentorship duration based on the mentor’s availability.
Resources Specific to Students’ Biggest Concerns
Mentors can send resources that would benefit their Glu-Close buddy. There are also resources to help support mentors in their mentorship role. The resources are content from CDN’s Off to College guides, but broken up into manageable, smaller articles.
My Takeaways
At the end of the project, my team and I felt genuinely excited about the positive impact Glu-Close Buddies could have on T1 diabetics that are transitioning to college. I was grateful to have worked with CDN on this platform and to have learned about the difficult experiences T1 diabetics have faced, and to hopefully make transitioning to college less of a concern and challenge for future students.
The importance of Needfinding
This project taught me a lot about searching beyond a design brief and paying attention to the voices of key stakeholders. Since our design sprint was only 8 weeks long, our team was a little stressed after spending 4 weeks on needfinding rather than zeroing in on the deliverable CDN had suggested (making a 2.0 “Off to College” guide). However, after user research, we were able to create a platform that better targeted the needs of prospective college students, while also incorporating the guides in a smaller way. The time we spent researching was well worth the investment!