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User Research: Freelancing as a Student

User Research and Ethnography | Duration: 5 week

User Research

User Experience

Team Project

Overview

What's the project?

Masters students often deal with a lot of work within tight timelines in college. Regardless, a lot of students do take up freelancing projects. How do they do it?

What we wanted to find out

Why do masters students take up freelancing? How are they handling their college and work? What issues do they face?

To answer our questions, we sought out participants through surveys, conducted interviews not only with students but faculty as well. We also conducted day in the life for two students before deriving our insights.

The tools we used

Most students sacrifice one or another aspect of their life while taking up freelancing projects. And their main hinderance to their ability to manage freelance work and college is to do with decision making fatigue.

What we found

What's the project?

Masters students often deal with a lot of work within tight timelines in college. Regardless, a lot of students do take up freelancing projects. How do they do it?

What we wanted to find out

Why do masters students take up freelancing? How are they handling their college and work? What issues do they face?

The tools we used

What we found

Our Research Topic

The Topic

Masters students tend to have a lot of projects and assignments under tight deadlines in college. Yet we observed that a lot of them do take up freelancing projects on the side. Did they have some superpowers or were they really good at time management?

Our Goals

We wanted to know what drove these students towards freelancing. What were their motivations? There must be something that made them go the extra mile
How are they managing their studies and their freelance projects? Is there any methods they use? Are there any problems they face?

Our Participants

In our campus we have multiple colleges all from varying fields. We made use of that advantage to find students that freelanced from the design college, fine arts college and architecture college. We aimed at 6 -10 participants. We also decided to take faculty into account since they have an impact on how a student will be able to freelance while in college and it would give us a more holistic view.

Planning

This was the plan that we followed:

The Process

Step 1: Recruit the participants

We prepared and distributed a questionnaire to find participants that fit our criteria. But since people are so used to questionnaire we also decided to take matter into our hands and also hunt them down as well.

Step 2: Interview the students

Solution #1 : The Application

After competitor analysis, creating the information architecture and defining the visual language of the museum, we started creating wireframes and building a mockup of the Kelkar app.

Solution#2: The Experience

We defined the visual language, incorporated theme based monthly events and added recharge and interaction stops along the way. We have prototyped one of our VR experiences here.

Solution#3: Collaboration

Raja Dinkar Kelkar museum lacked proper design systems. We saw this as an opportunity for collaboration with design colleges. Schools and museums have a unique bond which can be further elevated through events and special tours. This also would change how museums would be perceived with future generations.

Solutions and their Impact

We have kept in mind solutions catering for all the personas. Through our solutions we aim to change the feedback look for the better this way:

Check out the Prototype

We expanded this project to create a VR prototype of an experience offered at the Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum.

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