In this time, we are focusing on international students' social interaction problems and connections.
Our goal is to provide a better university learning experience for international students to immerse themselves in a foreign culture more quickly. I think overcoming the language barrier is the first problem. Therefore, we will have to develop a design that can track and feedback international students' learning situations in real-time.
Do we want to provide a service that helps international students feel included in the Uni? In the first stage, we decided to conduct interviews between international students and domestic students to see what problems they want to share the most while studying in Uni.
The most discussion problem that international students feel nonconfident is the language barrier.
On the other hand, local students think that scholarly communication with some international students is not very optimistic.
That's what we need to address, using these prevalent student community issues as a strategy for building a solution.
In DES230, I learned a lot of interesting strategic design drawings, such as
- Ecosystem map
- Problem-space map
- Research plan and findings
- Ideation template
- Value proposition
- Blueprint
These strategic blueprints help get a clear picture of what we want, the crux of the problem, and the best way to solve it. Simultaneously, when we need some feedback from the Audience, they can know our thinking strategy.
For example, when we produce ideas, we have eight ideas in total. Should we pay more attention to international students' community participation, or should we pay more attention to their academic focus? In most Audience feedback, they recognize that international students should communicate with local students or communities more often to overcome language barriers more quickly to integrate into the multi-community culture of New Zealand.
So, our product design idea became very clear. One is to speed up the interaction between international students and local students. The other is to speed up their university community's participation to overcome the language barrier more quickly.
Learning this course gave me a different understanding of future product design. We need to have our ideas, but we also need feedback from others to better design the right product. The production tools the teacher gave us are essential that we need in the future when developing strategies. I am very grateful that this course has brought me an understanding of the different aspects of design. Thank you.#DES230