C2C-U
SERVICE DESIGN / CONSULTING
CLIENT: College to Congress
ROLE: Point of Contact, UX Generalist, Workshop Facilitator
TIMELINE: 3 weeks
TOOLS: Google Forms, Mural, Zoom & Google Meet, Google Sites
METHODS: User Interviews, Surveys, Affinity Mapping
PROJECT DETAILS
THE CLIENT
College to Congress (C2C) is a non-partisan non-profit organization that wants to increase socioeconomic diversity in Congress by offering young people the tools, knowledge, and funding to participate in Congressional Internships.
CONTEXT
C2C-U offers self-paced, online learning courses that teach young people who want to work in Public Service how to secure Congressional Internships and succeed in the field. It is a very new program that College to Congress wants to invest in.
THE CHALLENGE
Evaluate C2C-U so that College to Congress staff could continue to deliver a high-quality online learning experience.
PROJECT GOALS
1. Discover what the C2C-U student experience was like through surveys and interviews.
2. Identify the most pressing pain points within the service and create recommendations for the organization.
3. Discover general Online Learning Preferences so that future lessons could achieve and maintain high levels of user engagement and satisfaction.
FINAL DELIVERABLES
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Competitive Analysis of LMS platforms
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Research- Based Personas
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Research Report & Recommendations
IDENTIFYING CLIENT NEEDS
What our client wanted to know:
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Were students enjoying the coursework and finding it meaningful?
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How can we make our lessons more interactive and engaging?
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Should our business switch to a different Learning Management System?
To answer these questions, we started with two concrete goals.
LMS Competitive Analysis
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This would help our client see which LMS platform would best suit their current and future needs.
User Surveys and Interviews
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We needed to hear about the experiences of current users and alums to see what could be done to improve their experience.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
LMS COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
To really remind myself about which features were non-negotiables for our client, I created a prioritization chart. These constraints helped us narrow down to the platforms that would be most useful and feasible for our client to switch to in the future.
The final product was this competitive analysis with three potential contenders for replacing Thinkific. We included Thinkific so that our client could easily compare other platforms to the one they were already using and just in case there were features on Thinkific they were unaware of.
Right now, they are still deciding on whether or not they want to make the switch as an organization.
SURVEYS
C2C-U STUDENT EXPERIENCE SURVEY
To get a general sense of what students thought about the C2C-U courses so far, we conducted a survey to learn about which lessons and activities within the "Interning on Capitol Hill 101" were the most meaningful and what students wanted more of from their experiences. We received 8 responses from C2C-U alums in total.
PROGRAM STRENGTHS
Students scored the program an average of 9.5/10 when asked about satisfaction. We determined that the strengths of the C2C-U lessons and structure were the following:
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Meaningful lessons, especially the Budgeting, Networking, LinkedIn, and Resume lessons
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Industry-specific insider knowledge
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Ability to self- pace
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Networking opportunities
PAIN POINTS
At the end of the day, it came down to wanting more meaningful interaction. Students were eager for more videos, videoconferencing opportunities, and forums to talk with others.
"Outlets to talk with others would be helpful. The course is somewhat isolating since it is just you and your computer for most of it."
Image of a woman alone on a computer. From wix.com
USER INTERVIEWS
C2C-U ALUMNI USER INTERVIEWS
Total Interviews: 4
While C2C-U students and alums really enjoyed the content and material, we noticed some issues with the mock interview opportunity and getting paired with a mentor. Students also expressed that they wanted more ways to communicate with and meet other people in the College to Congress network.
They also wanted deeper dives into the content they found most helpful, particularly the Budgeting and Networking lessons.
ONLINE LEARNING PREFERENCES INTERVIEWS
Total Interviews: 16
We ran into some trouble finding enough C2C-U alums to interview so we widened our research to include general findings about what people liked and didn't like in an online learning environment.
AFFINITY MAPPING
After we conducted 20 total interviews, I created an affinity mapping exercise on Mural so we could sort through this information to spot trends and develop takeaways.
PERSONAS
To further solidify our understanding of the typical C2C-U student and their learning preferences, we also created research-informed personas.
RESEARCH REPORT
We used Google Sites to create a Research Report for our client! This also helped us with hand-off since all of our materials and mockups for the Website Redesign we were doing could be linked there easily.
Our client really enjoyed the site and loved the format! It is currently unpublished for confidentiality reasons but College to Congress staff were made administrators and can look at it any time.
Here is a page from our report. I am happy to walk you through the website if you just shoot me an email or leave me a message!
REFLECTION
CHALLENGES
GATHERING ENOUGH TARGET GROUP INTERVIEWS
Though we tried to get as many interviews from C2C-U alumni as possible, the numbers were lower than we anticipated.
In order to give our client useful information, we needed to change our approach.
ADJUSTMENTS
RESEARCH THE BROADER TOPIC
We chose to research General Online Learning Preferences so we could learn about what people liked and expected from online lessons in general.
These discoveries will help College to Congress continue to make high-quality lessons that people will find meaningful and engaging.