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Improving student engagement and the website for HGAPS Benjamin Wagner, Ezekiel Wilkerson, Graham Watkins, Kennedy Goode

Our Mission

We are seeking to improve the website and student engagement for Helping Give Away Psychological Science, a student-led (501c3) nonprofit, that is dedicated to helping the best information about psychological science reach the people who would benefit. By improving the website, we aim to make the mission of HGAPS even more well known around the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Our Initial Survey

We surveyed students across all of UNC to understand their engagement with HGAPS and the HGAPS website. Through the user survey we found that of all of the respondents none of them have heard of HGAPS. What is also important to note is that none of these respondents are psychology majors. This emphasizes the need to improve the student engagement of HGAPS across all majors at UNC Chapel Hill. In doing so more students will have access to all of the wonderful resources provided by HGAPS.

Empathy Interview Results

We then conducted empathy interviews with some of the individuals from the initial survey to get more in-depth information about their feelings of the HGAPS website. We had them view the website prior to the interview and then we discussed with them what they saw, heard, thought, felt, and their pains and gains from the website.

Key Takeaways

User Profile

The user profile features the identity, needs, and key benefits for hypothetical stakeholders of HGAPS. While the identities themselves are hypothetical the demographics and needs are based on a second user survey we sent out to the HGAPS listserv asking how they use HGAPS and their biggest pains and gains with the website, Wikiversity page, and how to improve student engagement.

User Journey

The user journey depicts the typical engagements with HGAPS by students who are interested in psychological research, students who want to receive help with their mental health, clinicians, and donors.

Ecosystem

The ecosystem map highlights the key stakeholders, constraints, and competitors for HGAPS. The key stakeholders are undergraduate and graduate students, clinicians, donors, and professors. The major constraints were diversifying the awareness of HGAPS members and users by major, ensuring that each stakeholder is able to easily access the information that they need from the website, and ensuring that their most important resources and services were front and center on the website. It is critical to understand HGAPS does not have competitors but rather allies in making psychological resources more accessible to individuals throughout the globe. The competitors are listed because they provide similar services to HGAPS however, it would be in their best interest to collaborate with these organizations to not only make their services more accessible but also make the other organizations services more accessible as well.

Features Comparison

Through the features comparison chart we compared HGAPS to UNC CAPS, UNC Student Wellness, and Practice Wise. Again, we are just showing that other organizations offer similar services to HGAPS but they do not have to be seen as competition but rather they would be great to collaborate to make HGAPS and these organizations better and so that all of the organizations can reach a wider audience.

Marketing Collateral

This is the TikTok page for HGAPS. We made their first three TikToks to market HGAPS, with each video racking up around 150 plays in the first day.

One of the major problems we were trying to solve with this project is to get more eyeballs on the website, and to make HGAPS’s content more accessible to a broader audience. What better way to do that than by integrating HGAPS into social media platforms, where HGAPS can be brought to light for both students and other users of social media?

TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms today, and continues to grow in popularity as a large influencer of culture and advancement of information. In our meetings with the members of HGAPS, we discussed how we might bring HGAPS to just a tap away from a larger user base.

In our discussion we brainstormed what an HGAPS oriented TikTok would look like to concisely convey content in an engaging manner. Using infographics with background music was the simplest and most effective strategy that we could realistically establish. By providing easily accessible content on one of the most popular social media sites, we were able to materialize one of HGAPS’s biggest goals of spreading awareness and growing its user base. Looking forward, we believe HGAPS will be able to levy this platform to continue to spread awareness of psychological resources. HGAPS is making many new infographics in a shareable form that can potentially be put up on TikTok as well.

Prototyping Phase

During the prototyping phase we took all of the knowledge we gathered from the various empathy interviews and surveys to create a prototype that would benefit the stakeholders of HGAPS.

Prototype Number One

This is a screen recording of our initial prototype for the HGAPS website redesign. We decided to use Weebly.com as this is a platform HGAPS uses for their primary website so we wanted to make our prototype as similar as possible to ensure that our ideas could be easily replicated. Our biggest goals with our initial redesign was ensuring that the various demographics can easily use the website in a way that will benefit them. We also ensured that the services that HGAPS provides were front and center to ensure that any new visitors of the website could easily understand what HGAPS does and how it might be beneficial to them.

The Focus Group

Focus Group with HGAPS members on 4/15/21

We then took our prototype to the most important stakeholders, those in the HGAPS organization. We shared our screen to show our redesigned version of the website as all of the participants had already seen the original website. We received a lot of feedback on how we can iterate our prototype to ensure that it is even more user friendly and beneficial to those who use the HGAPS website.

Prototype Number Two

Audio Reflection

Video Reflection

Follow-Up Survey

Upon developing the second prototype we put together a follow-up survey to get final thoughts on our second prototype. There were many positive comments and overall it seems as though the HGAPS stakeholders liked the redesign that we created for the website. We will pass on this website to the HGAPS team so that they can add what they love the most to their website. Below is the positive feedback we received on the second prototype.

"There are a good variety of images as well as logos, also visually appealing and easy to look at"
"Very visually appealing and polished. Enjoyed the photos and graphics"
"Looks great, very clean and looks good while making the information easily accessible"

The following are suggestions that the HGAPS team could use to refine and iterate the website even more.

"Potentially organize the resources without all the underlined links"
"in the "recent projects" sections where you are showcasing the projects on the right hand side, I think it would look more visually appealing directly under where the project is full blown"

Reflection

Ultimately, we really enjoyed working with HGAPS to create the website redesign. We hope that these materials are helpful in increasing student engagement and making the website more easy and accessible to use. We look forward to seeing how this website redesign will help HGAPS help others!