I met up with my partner, Grace, to take on a design thinking crash course. We set up a two-hour time slot after our first class meeting to work through the design thinking process in real-time. I must admit, I have only completed a project like this once, actually, through my previous class, which was literally called “Design Sprints”. While my previous sprint was very successful in gaining proper insights from our user testers for adjustments, I still felt like a design thinking beginner with lots to learn. 

That’s where my crash course with Grace came in… 

As we began the call, just getting to know each other a people before design thinkers, we discovered Grace and I have very different experiences at QU so far. Grace is a QU undergrad and now a master’s student. While I have not even set foot on campus. Where grace had more insights about the school’s physical environment, I had more experience with the online-only experience. While this could have been a dividing factor for our interview and entire crash course, we actually used this to our advantage. We began ideating ways we could make the entire QU online graduate program better and more inclusive for those who have years of QU under their belt and people like me who haven’t even seen the campus in person…just really great photos! 

We both acknowledge the importance of getting the most out of our time in this program, so we wanted a way to create an even more beneficial program for all students. So we each took five minutes to come up with “problems” we both have experienced with QU. We then listened and took notes on each other’s findings. We then took our findings and insights and turned them into HWM questions or How Might We… questions. Grace and I combined both of our finds and experiences into one question. That question being, “How might we find a way to blend the QU undergrad and non-QU undergrad students to create a universal experience?” 

Grace and I then began to actually come up with sketches and ideas for solutions. We choose to utilize digital drawings and images to reflect the online experience more accurately. We both thought of a buddy system or mentorship program. We then had to figure out who would be the mentor and what they would provide and give to the mentees in the program. This led us to further think on the buddy system and decide the most effective combination would be if it were between QU undergrad students returning to the university and non-QU undergrad students who are also pursuing a master’s but don’t have the background of QU previously. We then started ideating on what the mentorship would consist of. We decided the most beneficial mentorship program would consist of calls and virtual tours/hangouts between buddies to help make the online experience feel the most physical, even with the barrier of technology between the students and campus. Then, through the final stages of the interview, we prototyped and tested the program against ourselves and discovered an area of adjustment, maybe to have the buddy system begin at orientation and carry on throughout the length of the program. 

While this was just a crash course, we both felt that if this were actually tested in a full sprint or test, it would be very successful for all parties involved.

Check out Grace and I’s interview below!