Hyper Island
In this five week long project we helped students create a strategy to find their best possible internship.
In this five week long project we helped students create a strategy to find their best possible internship.
All programs at Hyper Island in Karlskrona includes a long period of internship. This is a great opportunity to become real world ready and to kick-start your career.
Students find their internships themselves, and as much as it's exciting, it can also feel overwhelming.
We wanted to understand how we can help each and every student find an internship that they love.
We were a team of five UX design students at Hyper Island. I was involved in every part of the process.
Five week long project in January and February 2020.
Presentation of our findings and showcase of our prototype.
We asked students that are currently looking for internships and students who have gone through the process about How, Where and When they’re looking for internship.
We also asked them what they want in an internship and how they feel about the process of finding it.
From this we formed three hypotheses.
Then we tested them in 15 in-depth interviews (3 per person) and one focus group.
User journey and Empathy map.
By doing this we could compare our data and prioritize the things that we saw over and over again.
We realized that students struggled the most in the beginning of the process or even before, when they felt overwhelmed and confused. This lead to procrastination since there is no guidance on where and when to start.
After our research we started ideating on how to answer the question
How might we help students finding a strategy when looking for an internship?
What is a strategy? We defined it as a plan that includes three levels. A vision for the future that is broken down into a few goals. These goals are then divided into tactics, which are steps to get there.
We started our ideation process by generating a lot of ideas together. Then we individually developed one idea each further. After that we discussed these ideas and tried to merge them together by sketching user flows, information architecture and user interfaces.
The core of our concepts was to create a visual strategy that is easy to fill in. Some features we discussed and explored was:
We started building wireframes and tested with our users.
We developed different prototypes to test our different features.
Our testing showed that the most important part of our idea is the visualization of the strategy. Other features got questioned a lot.
We understood that they were unecessary and we started developing our core idea further.
Our MVP only includes the part that we proved helpful to students- the visual strategy that is easy to fill in.
This was our final prototype. The steps (tactics) that we put in the different categories are steps that the people we interviewed told us that they took or wanted to take in their process to find an internship.
To develop this idea further we would have investigated which steps are important and in what order they should be.
We also wanted to see how we could balance personalization and guidance in the best possible way.
This project was presented to stakeholders at Hyper Island and inspired further development of how the school helps students finding an internship.
Some of my personal learning outcomes in this project were:
