HGSE Student Experience
Project
As an admin of the slack channel during my studies, I got very involved in student politics, met often with admin, and advocated for student rights. This led to me become a student representative at the Student Success Team at the school of education, and to join the research group of one of my colleagues. I joined the team for the entire academic year for her course on Critical Participatory Action Research in my interest to deepen my knowledge in qualitative research, and we used the findings from the research to keep the dialogue open with the university and help our fellow students as much as possible.
My role
As mentioned on the website, my contribution included:
Developing Research Questions
Developing the Study Design
Provided input on the topic guide
Jointly conducted data collection and analysis.
Created data visualisations
Webdesigner & Illustrator
I will focus in this entry on my design role as a visual storyteller, as the rest of the research presents itself in the website itself.
Design
Context
We lived on zoom those few years as many recall, and the whole purpose of the study was highlighting the inequity of student experiences during that time, with zoom screen being our only connection to each other.
Theme
I chose the zoom screen for the theme. I created over 40 illustrations of my fellow students, professors and colleagues and placed those into the grid. Those we interviewed where not included, unless they were also my classmates and had given consent to be on the grid.
sample from the grid
Color scheme
Grey scale with a hint of browns was chosen to imply skin color and anonymised us even further and to reflect the situation we were in. The red chosen for contrast used the Harvard colors, which in hindsight was an accessibility issue, since it usually implies an action.
color palette from wix
Flow
This website was built on WIX and was created with minimal coding, relying on the features available in the website tool itself. I played a lot with interactive elements that help tell the story. Most of the interactive elements focused on the research questions and the data results, since telling the story of the participants was most improtant.
The research questions animation was designed to mimic highlighting the speaker on zoom as each screen appears, giving the participants a voice.
When showing the demographics of participants, I had to strip the data from identifiers, i therefore replaced our faces with emojis. This was done with minimal coding, so it was hard to have it flow as smoothly as I would have liked it to.
Outcome
In addition to having all pages as a horizontal menu on top, I added arrows to navigate to the next page from the bottom to maximize flow and avoid the jumpy feel of “back to top” since I wanted the experience to be seamless and mimic that of a research paper, which is what this project was.
To ensure flow, and allow users to browse through the pages quickly, I kept the literature review as summaries with the possibility to “find out more” for those who want to dive in deep.
The final website is available here: https://siiima.wixsite.com/hgse-student-voices
