The Goal

The goal of this project was to design a way for Teaching Assistants and Graduate Assistants to be able to complete onboarding process (with confident in their abilities and highly independent), need ways to solve problems immediately, receive meaningful feedback in either virtual or in-person ways, and always have the choice to work independently or with their peers.

Data Collection

To start the data collection process, our team reached out to the program manager to recruit the interviewees. From the interviewee pool, we interviewed the current iSchool students. The goal of the interviews was to uncover insights about the participants' experiences onboarding to their position. After the interviews, we conducted 30 minute-long interpretation sessions for each interview, where we reviewed the interviews and generated notes that we felt would be key in aiding our design process.

Insights

There were several insights gained from the interpretation sessions

Onboarding Assistants mentioned that because they were already in the system due to their prior work as TAs or GAs, onboarding seemed much easier the 2nd time around.

Appointment Letter There were major issues surrounding the assistantship experience, such as dates of their contracts not matching their actual work dates. Assistants reported feeling anxious about not receiving their appointment letter before starting their assistantship, as this is tied to their tuition remission.

COVID-19 Assistants felt that the move to virtual work helped in some aspects, including better office hours and time management. Some assistants disagreed, noting how hard it was to get meaningful, immediate feedback for issues and problems.

Problem Solving Assistants want to solve problems on their own, using a combination of online and email resources, and  want to interact in person if problems could not be solved virtually, or if they felt they did not receive a satisfactory first response.

Affinity Diagram

The goal of the affinity diagram was to reveal in one place all the issues, worries, and key elements of the users' lives relevant to the project focus. With an affinity diagram, we iteratively grouped together data points to identify overarching themes. Based on the affinity diagram, we were able to identify four areas of concern that can be described as the four stages of being a TA/GA.

1. TAs and GAs are excited to start their appointment, quickly wanting to sign their appointment letters and also wanting to complete the onboarding process quickly.

2. TAs and GAs feels so confident they believe that can find solutions to their problems without help from IT.

3. TAs and GAs have become more familiar with their role and they realize things aren't going as smoothly as they thought.

4. They realize the importance of communication in having successful appointment.

Journey Map

From the data collected through the interviews and organized in the affinity diagram, we created a journey map for our fictional persona. The goal of the journey map was to understand the experiences (both good and bad) a GAs or TAs might encounter during onboarding. There were four main phases of the journey:

1. Preparing and turning in onboarding and hiring documents.

2. The persona investigates how to address information gaps dealing with health insurance and tuition remission.

3. They start the assistantship, and learn to solve simple problems on their own as they come up.

4. Soon, however, they discover some missing critical documents, and will need to quickly reach out to iSchool and IT staff to resolve the issues.

Sequence Model

To dive deeper into the stages of how TAs or GAs prepare for and start their upcoming assistantship, we also created a sequence model. The goal of this model was to identify some specific actions in the process, the assistants' intent behind them, and issues and pain points that they encounter.

Product Concept Ideation

From affinity diagrams and several models, we had hot ideas and visions, and we conceptualized a web dashboard for users to stay updated on their onboarding and appointment status in addition to their problem-solving workflow.

1. Status overview section: users can see which documents they need to turn in and already complete with a color indicator.

2. A section of different categories: users can quickly access sections such as their appointment status, documents, and tickets.

3. Option for users to save and keep their completed documents

Based on the product concept, I created a prototype of the information dashboard.

Special Thanks to Dr.Lutters and Team Affordances