Overview

Project Brief

The Adele H. Stamp Student Union (STAMP) is the student activity center at the University of Maryland. It aims to nurture a welcoming and inclusive community through events, resources, and intentional programming.

The university is home to 40,000+ students who have a wide range of interests, habits, and social media preferences and with over 3,000 events happening in and around the building each year it had become increasingly difficult for the Marketing and Communications Department to effectively communicate and engage with the student body.

The Problem

Despite having a dedicated website, STAMP departments used various channels of communication (social media, email newsletters, etc.) but none to their full potential.

The Goal

The objective was to identify the most effective way for STAMP Marketing and Communications to reach their audience and provide recommendations for improvement to their strategy.

The Process



Research

Defining the Scope

Understanding the Problem with Background Research

To define the scope of the project, we performed a quick in person survey of students in STAMP to gauge what the student body’s perception of the usefulness of the current methods being used to reach them. Subsequently, we met with our client to learn more about what channels were being used to reach the student body and how they are being utilized. From this discussion we were asked to discover which channels were most effective and make recommendations on where the marketing team's efforts should be focused.

Contextual Inquiry

The contextual design process allowed us to gather insights into the way students find events enabling us to propose the best ways for the marketing team to reach their audience.

We decided to interview students that represented the following groups:

• Underclassmen
• Upperclassmen
• Graduate Students
• On-Campus (1/2mile radius)
• Off-Campus Students
• International Students
• Domestic Students

Interview Focus

• How do students learn about upcoming events?
• What social media channels do they interact with?
• What do students typically go to stamp for?
• Do they attend events alone or with others?
• What type of events do they attend?
• Where do they keep track of information about upcoming events they are interested in?
• Observe how students use their choice of social media for event finding
• Observe how students navigate the stamp website to find an event

Data Interpretation & Analyzation

Affinity Diagram

After we concluded eight contextual inquiries and interpretation sessions, we build an affinity diagram to help us discover the various patterns within our data

We took over 400 notes from the interviews and placed them on the wall, with similar ideas in the same column. Continuing with this process we found overarching themes that ultimately told a story about our users and their various experiences in and around STAMP.



Key Findings

1. Stamp is a central hub for students. For everything from the food court to studying in the private nooks, many students find themselves in STAMP throughout the week.
2. As we initially suspected, we discovered that the majority of the UMD population commonly finds out about events from the internet.
3. We also learned that there are a lot of students that like to plan out their schedule and upcoming events, and there is a lot of variation in the approach students have.
4. One of the project goals our client set out for us was to learn how the current marketing channels affect students, one of those channels was the physical advertising. We found that while some students engage with posters, the TVs and way finders were not effective.
5. There are a multitude of variables that alter students’ decisions to attend events.
6. We learned that people (i.e. friends, classmates, etc.) have a large effect on students’ choice in event attendance.

Day in the Life Model

During each interpretation session we created separate models for each interviewee and then consolidated them. The purpose of creating a day in the life model was to graphically show how users accomplish the task of finding certain events. We wanted to understand how the users navigated their world, what they did in different places, what devices they used to get things done, and how they access the content they needed.



Key Findings

Based off our six larger findings we found that there were three main parts to a student’s event finding experience:

• Discovery
• Planning
• Attendance

Sequence Model

Sequence models were built to capture the triggers, intents, and steps of each user's event finding process through the various channels they used. These diagrams helped define the scenarios of use that our product design must support and identify lower-level usability issues. The individual models were consolidated into one sequence model to drive detailed design.

Key Findings

Major breakdowns we discovered through this model were:

• Students had trouble finding upcoming events
• Students had trouble finding enough information about the events
• When visiting the STAMP website and viewing the event calendar, they had trouble finding the calendar and when they did, they were overwhelmed by the number of events that were displayed. Due to this, they had trouble sifting through it all

Design

Visioning

To provide us with the opportunity to review the story crafted from the interview data, we performed a wall walk of our affinity diagram.

We created a list of all our ideas and divided them into two sections – issues and hot ideas. From this list, we chose five ideas to turn into design concepts.



Product Concepts
















Final Client Meeting

Our final step in the user research process was to report our findings and product concepts to our client. We conducted a board room presentation with Eva Quintos Tennant, the Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications, joined by the Graphic Design and Marketing Coordinators of STAMP.

They were excited about our recommendations and were interested in implementing some in their marketing strategy immediately.