Brown Opps

The Dean of Undergraduate Students commissioned my team to create a platform where students could find internship and research opportunities through Brown University.

I was the sole designer on the team and worked closely with 3 developers and a product manager over the course of a semester. We had weekly standup sessions and bi-weekly hour long work sessions during the later stages.

THE PROBLEM

Applying to research is hard

SPRINT (Summer/Semester Projects for Research, Internship, Teaching) serves as the umbrella application for funded experiential learning opportunities at Brown University. The original format for finding internships was a large word document (left), but the large amount of listings made it difficult to search through and apply for internships. The dean came to us with a rough prototype that was created using airtable (right) and wanted a platform that would allow students to easily locate, manage, get info for, and apply to SPRINT opportunities.

USER INTERVIEWS

After familiarizing myself with the problem space, I set out to find out how real people around me approached internship hunting. I conducted a dozen user interviews, asking students around campus to find out:

Are you currently looking for job/internship opportunities?
What platforms do you use to find internships?
What platform do you use most often to find internships? Why?
What factors do you consider the most when looking for an internship?
What industry are you looking to work in?

Based on my user research I found that Linkedin and Handshake were used most often by Brown students when looking for internships. Additionally, information like industry, salary, location, and time were important factors to students.

USER PERSONAS

I created two user personas to guide my ideation process. One student Florentin is looking for a very specific internship, while the other student Horacio is just browsing the platform.

MOODBOARD

I wanted to emulate a clean, yet fun design that allowed users to easily view the most important details of a listing upfront.

WIREFRAMING

Let's start designing

After reviewing my research, I knew that I wanted to create a platform where filtering and searching was a priority. I started designing very rough wireframe sketches on paper before going into Figma to create the digital wireframes.

Florentin's user flow

Horacio's user flow

Wireframes made in Figma

After I had a clearer picture of what the scope of the project was, the team and I decided which features we had time to implement for this semester and which ones to hold off on. For example, we wanted to send automated emails of new opportunities based on a user's saved jobs, but decided that it should be implemented later down the line.

LOW-FI DESIGNS

The overall feedback I received from the wireframes was that the search and filter pages seemed straightfoward. However, there were two actionable insights I gained:

The results felt cluttered with icons.
Many people did not understand how to engage with the homepage even though I had intended it for it to be a place for exploration.

FINAL DELIVERABLES

Easily find and apply to research positions

In order to improve readability and increase engagement I:

Used one font throughout the platform and removed unnecessary icons.
Reorganized the hierarchy of the job listing component.
Allowed for more whitespace in the overall design.

After a couple more rounds of feedback, I handed off my designs to the developers! I am proud of the designs I ended up creating and it was satisfying to watch the project come together from conception to deployment.

01 LOGIN AND HOMEPAGE

Dynamic recommendations for you on the homepage.

02 SEARCH

Browse and filter research positions.

03 SAVED JOBS

Save jobs that you can apply to later.

04 CREATE A JOB LISTING

Live preview a listing before publishing.

NEXT STEPS

While it was daunting when I first approached the project, I've definitely learned a lot and grown as a designer! Future steps include:

Work on transferring the platform to mobile.
Further user test the platform after deployment.