Client: Carnegie Mellon University Housing and Residential Services
CMU Housing and Residential Services supports students who live on-campus. Their goal is to promote growth, diversity, and community so students may have a meaningful residential experience.
Project Duration: 12 weeks
Team: Mihika Bansal, Evelyn DiSalvo
A user-centered Website that promotes inclusivity through information accessibility.
Project Summary
All students are required to live on-campus in dormitories their first year at Carnegie Mellon University. For genderqueer students, choosing a housing community can be a stressful experience, as many are separated by binary gender categories. Working with students, staff, and administration, we redesigned the first-year housing webpage to address user pain points—particularly that of information accessibility.
Skills
User-Centered Design, Interaction Design, User Research, Systems Thinking
Our Process
We started by conducting interviews, surveys, and workshops with students, staff, and administration. In these conversations, we were able to understand the housing system. From our research, we found that most students, even queer students, did not know of the existence of a gender-inclusive living space within the housing communities. As such, administration found that they could not fill the gender-inclusive communities and would auto-allocate cisgender students into these living spaces. We synthesized our findings into the following systems map:
Research Outcomes
It became clear that the primary area of intervention was the means in which information about gender-inclusive living spaces is communicated to incoming students. We created a comparison matrix analyzing CMU's housing website to similar universities'. This task allowed us to better understand the information flows of other universities, but also—and more importantly—how prospective students may be familiar with navigating through websites while trying to make their college decisions.
Design Solution
Our intervention had two simple, yet impactful, changes:
1) We moved the gender-inclusive housing option out of the section "Themed Living" onto the primary page. Not only was the information buried amongst other types of living communities, making it hard to find, but most students also found the term "themed" to be vague. Therefore, it made sense to separate the information to reduce two friction points.
2) We organized the page information into drop-down menus. Before, the website had all of the information posted in large text blocks, making the webpage long and hard to decipher. By organizing key information in a succinct way, we increased navigability and reduced further frictions.
We utilized university design guidelines in our prototype, thus allowing our changes to be incorporated seamlessly into the existing website.
Impact
We worked with staff and administration to have the website design implemented for the next prospective class. Since then, the website has gone through redesigns, but the accessibility of gender-inclusive housing has remained a priority.