Hannah Arnett

Project Goal

To assist Purdue University with their goal of building the black community on the West Lafayette campus through my senior capstone project

Introduction

Click here to see the full project documentation.

For my senior capstone, I formed team UniteUs with my friend and user experience designer, Skyler Beld. Together, we sought to positively impact the community through our last undergraduate project at Purdue, and we found the perfect opportunity to do so by helping the black community on campus. With roughly 50,000 students on campus, they make up less than 2% of the student body, and the Division of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging has established initiatives to increase this number in the coming years. A key issue relayed by our project client, Renee Thomas, the Associate Vice Provost for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, is the lack of black students accepting their offer letters from Purdue. Our team was allowed to assist in this endeavor where we researched the issue and developed a high-fidelity prototype of a mobile app designed for Purdue’s black community.

Learning Objectives

Our main goal with our research was to help Purdue better understand the experiences of current black students on campus, and how said experiences may affect enrollment numbers.

• Why are black students choosing NOT to enroll into Purdue after being accepted?
• Are there specific problems on Purdue’s campus causing a low black population?
• What can our team do to address this problem using our skills, strengths, and abilities in our senior capstone project?

Measures of Success

• Client - Does the Associate Vice Provost for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging see value in our deliverables? Will our deliverables be pursued further by Purdue faculty/staff to help with their goals?
• Problem - Do the deliverables address the problem?
• Testing - Do black students, faculty, and staff approve of our mobile app prototype and concepts? Is the app easy to use and attractive?

Researching Issues of the Black Community

Tackling such a sensitive issue like race is no simple task, especially for two white Computer Graphics Technology seniors with little power on campus. This is why we sought to see Purdue through the eyes of black students, to learn about their thoughts, opinions, and experiences surrounding Purdue. My partner and I felt that if we could identify a common theme of struggles black students face on campus, and attempt to provide a solution for that through this project, Purdue can become more appealing to those with offer letters trying to make an enrollment decision. By making Purdue’s black community more welcoming, we assume that more offers will be accepted.

At first we conducted student interviews with several volunteers, both in-person and online through Google forms. An overarching theme we noticed is they feel Purdue lacks a welcoming social environment for black students. Said students reported struggling to find resources especially within the black community, feeling isolated from their white classmates and professors because of their race, and because there are so few of them on campus, they struggle to form connections with other black students.

One of the questions we asked these students was if there were things they wished they knew about Purdue when they were making their enrollment decision. One student replied,

Yes. I wish I knew what the black community was actually doing."

When asked what helped them feel welcome on campus, most of the responses involved socializing with other black students, faculty, and staff on campus.

From this insightful information, my partner and I concluded that we could address these issues by developing a mobile app focusing on all that Purdue’s black community has to offer for students. Purdue is a huge university with a seemingly overwhelming number of organizations, events, and resources, so an app that makes information in the black community easy to find allows for new students to find their place on campus with less stress. Our idea is that students who are accepted into Purdue are invited to download the app to explore Purdue's black community before they make an enrollment decision. Of course, the app would also be used by current students, faculty, and staff. The Associate Vice Provost for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging approved of our ideas, so we got started on the app development.

App Design and Development Process

To quickly summarize the process, the initial steps of designing and developing our high-fidelity prototype involved a literature review on topics of race and community, concept sketches, a sitemap, a user-flow map, and a style guide. After these steps were completed, reviewed, and finalized, we moved onto the low-fidelity wireframes and usability testing, and then the mid-fidelity prototype and concept testing. After all testing was finished and designs were revised, I completed the high-fidelity, limited functionality mobile app compatible for Android devices. I also created the style guide and mid-fidelity prototype, and worked with my partner on the sketches, sitemap, user-flow map, and testing.

During the ideation phase, we kept the following questions in our minds as we sketched out our ideas:

• What are ideas/initiatives that would support community-building while being in the form of a mobile application?
• What are tangible solutions that Purdue could implement to increase the number of black students?
• What is Purdue already doing that’s not in the spotlight, and how can we make it easy for them to find as a resource within the application?
• What information do students want or need as a freshman?

After sketching out multiple concepts that could be included in the app, we came together as a team to discuss what we had and what would be implementable but would support the black community in an impactful way. We came up with the following main features and concepts to include in the application based on the research we found: a mentorship program, discussion of the week, community goals, community resources, chat forum, and news.

Low-Fidelity Prototype

Mid-Fidelity Prototype

Concept Testing Results with Mid-Fidelity Prototype Walkthrough

We conducted concept testing with several black students, faculty, and staff at the Black Cultural Center to determine if our app concepts meet the wants and needs of the black community. We used the results of our concept testing as one way to measure our success with this project.

Overall, we received positive feedback from our testing participants. In an online survey participants took after the app demonstration with the mid-fidelity prototype, 75% strongly agreed that the app concepts support the black community on Purdue’s campus and the app demonstration was easy to follow. 25% agree, and none disagree. Participants also had the ability to write to us. One participant wrote,

This app has so much potential for Black students at Purdue and for Black youth considering attending Purdue!"

High-Fidelity Walkthrough

We wanted to transition from the image screens of the mid-fidelity prototype to a less functional yet interactive mobile app that could work on a mobile device. When developing this high-fidelity prototype, I wanted to include most of the screens we designed in the mid-fidelity prototype with enough- but not all- of the intended functionality to show as an example.

To create the mobile app, I used Flutter, an open-source framework that supports app development, and Visual Studio Code as my code editor. This project was my first experience developing a mobile app of any sort, so I chose Flutter because it was fast to learn, easy to use, and provides plenty of documentation and tutorials.

The app was accessed and debugged using Android Studio (with an emulator), and a physical Android device (Samsung Note 8+) that was connected to the computer throughout the coding process. Although we want the mobile app to work with both iOS and Android, the prototype was developed specifically for Android devices because I was developing the app on a PC and Flutter requires a Mac to support iOS app development.

The high-fidelity prototype is missing some of the screens we designed in the mid-fidelity prototype. This was because we wanted to focus our attention and time on the three major functions of the app: Browse Resources, Mentorship Program, and Chat Forum. We also wanted to avoid creating a large folder that takes an excessive amount of storage when submitting our deliverables to the Division of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

To best understand all that this app has to offer, please see the demonstration video below where I walk you through the main functions of the app and their purpose.

Conclusions

We measured our success based on the feedback we received from Purdue’s black community, including leadership figures of the Black Cultural Center. We’ve shown the app prototypes to faculty, staff, and students at the Black Cultural Center, and many had great things to say about the app and the opportunities it could bring to the community. Our usability and concept testing results were also mostly positive minus a few small changes needed along the way. We also assessed if our final deliverables met our project goals set to help us solve our problem. Through our client’s approval, hitting project goals, and positive feedback, we will confidently be able to say that this project is a success. However, the best case scenario is that Purdue will take interest in our solution and implement some or even all of our project concepts.

My partner and I learned a lot from this project. We are a group of two people, trying to tackle a large and complex problem with our senior capstone project. We were heavily reliant on one another, and from this we exercised many of our interpersonal skills including communication, flexibility, and conflict management. We also actively sought to learn new tools to complete our deliverables. I personally learned a great deal about mobile app development. I learned an entirely new programming language and style of development in order to make the high-fidelity prototype on an Android device.

Project Social Media

Website: https://teamuniteuspurdue.wordpress.com/