Design
Overview
CS BigxLittle Program
This project is around belonging in Computer Science at Northwestern. Our audience is anyone part of the Computer Science community, including students, teacher assistants, professors, and grad students. My team of four worked for ten weeks on this project, and a current professor at NU is considering implementing an aspect of our service.
Role: Designer
Date: Winter 2022
Skills: User Interviewing,
User Journey Mapping, Blueprinting
Role
As a Computer Science major who also is a peer mentor for an introductory course at NU, I was able to contribute with some inside knowledge on our user group. I used my passion for mentorship and my role as a peer mentor to fuel the motivation for our team to head in the peer mentor direction of belonging.
Process
We conducted many user observations to hear from people of various backgrounds within the CS community. That led us to narrow down to the audience of peer mentors within the CS community, and we built touchpoints like PM slideshow, matching form, and newsletter.
Work
We created a service blueprint for our BigxLittle program that provides mentorship for new PMs. We hope this service is lightweight and easy to implement given constraints like the professor's time and PM interest.
Success Metrics
After our first Review where we had our stakeholders such as CS professors and grad students come and hear our current ideas, we sparked more interest and input on our training student leaders framework. From there, we considered constraints and took the steps that we thought were the most realistic to implement. We presented in front of Professors, and they agreed the area of interest we dove into was important and relevant. They hope to create a PM community moving forward.
Reflections
From this project, I learned how to communicate, bounce off ideas with teammates, and shift through many areas of our initial topic and different possible solutions based on what excites us. Looking back, I would have surveyed more PMs to see whether there was a large interest or need for our solution rather than solely focusing on user interviews. From that, I hope to use my improved communication and collaboration skills to design services I'm passionate about.