While we were already given the specific problem our service was meant to tackle, we realized that it was first important to further understand the problem space, especially as a group of all non-CS majors. We each completed two different design research exercises to do so: a mind map and a stakeholder map.

Engaging With Stakeholders

Throughout the course of this project, we implemented many different research techniques:

• Interviews: we conducted interviews with 10 CS students, 2 non-CS students, 3 CS professors, and 1 PHD student

• Service Safari: we explored the resources currently being offered to students

• Shadowing: we shadowed CS 111, an introductory CS class at Northwestern

Defining Our Users

Our initial interviews with students focused on understanding their current experiences in CS. We wished to understand the struggles they faced in CS, the origin of these struggles, and potential areas for growth. We also wanted to understand the general motivations and desires in pursuing CS. These interviews allowed us to narrow down on two more specific personas.

• Primary Persona: first-time CS students in introductory classes

• Secondary Persona: dedicated professors of introductory CS classes

Synthesizing Our Observations

Ideations

Based on the three synthesis frameworks we created, we generated over 150 ideas aimed at solving the issue. This allowed us to think quickly and pushed us to consider even crazy, bad ideas as well. From these 150 ideas, we settled on 3 to further explore through storyboards. These brought our ideas to life so that we could begin to prototype, test, and validate their worth.

Narrowing In

By testing our story boards on users, we were able to receive much-needed feedback on what concepts could lead to an impact that would directly benefit first-year CS students. The feedback we received is ultimately what made us realize that the most important avenue to target was the connections students are having with other students. Beyond narrowing down our problem scope, we also were able to identify some research insights that guided the development of our final HMW question.

Prototyping Seat Buddies

With our HMW set, we put our first idea into action: Seat Buddies.

Seat Buddies was a service that would assign students in introductory CS classes a partner or small group to sit with during the first few weeks of the quarter. Each class, the partner or group would complete a get-to-know you activity, with the intention that by the end they would have a new friend or familiar face in the class. By giving someone an automatic buddy, we thought this service may reduce the burden of feeling alone. We prototyped and tested three touch points of the service:

1. the assignment of the seating buddy

2. the get-to know you activity

3. physical indicators of grouping in the lecture hall

Pivoting

Overall, we found that the students we tested our prototypes on felt that the connection was forced and unnatural. They didn’t seem enthusiastic about the service, and neither were we. While we thought that our service was addressing a real need of students, it wasn’t getting at the issue in the right way.

Our failure provided a few important insights that we used to guide our future direction:

1. Students would much rather engage in activities than simply sit next to each other and answer a few cringey icebreaker questions

2. Students indicated that any engagement needed to occur in a manner that “forced” students to engage with those they didn’t know: there was no incentive for people that already had friends in the class to participate in seating buddies

3. It was important to keep the service within class time, as we learned that students often didn’t have the time to participate in additional programming, especially if its only purpose was to meet other students

We realized we needed to take a step backward, so we returned to our ideas and began brainstorming again. Our ideas started out bold and broad, but thinking in such a way is what allowed us to ultimately land on a scavenger hunt activity.

Rather than utilizing lecture time, which was not conducive to engaging with new people due to the set up of the lecture hall, Command F was a scavenger hunt activity that would take place during the class’ first tutorial session. Tutorials are similar to discussion sections for other college classes and involve 1-12 students and a Peer Mentor (a TA) who helps the students with class material.

This activity made people in tutorial compete against each other in small groups as they completed various missions. These missions were a mix of:

1. Simply fun activities, such as making tik-toks and taking selfies,

2. Discussion starters, such as “Who in your group has traveled the farthest North?”

3. CS-related activities, whether that involved finding a professor’s office, navigating a study space, or decoding a message using binary code

With Command F, we hoped to encourage interaction and engagement in a more active, goal-oriented manner, which we believed would be more successful.

To test out our new idea, we contacted 4 current and past CS 110 students and simulated a tutorial session. I acted as the Peer Mentor, explaining the activity and providing the instructions. Then, we let the four individuals complete the scavenger hunt themselves while one of our designers went undercover to observe the interactions in the group.

The reaction we got from the professors and PHD students was extremely validating. Many of the professors spoke of trying to initiate similar services as Seating Buddies but failing for the same reasons we did. They understood the struggle to foster engagement in such large lecture halls, especially in a post-pandemic world where interaction like this hasn’t been the norm for years. Importantly for them, they could see how this activity could easily fit into their class structure without causing major problems or work on their end.

While Command F is still a hypothetical service, we believe that there is great opportunity for it to be added to the introductory classes at Northwestern One of the professors asked us to send them our project materials so she could work on implementing it next year!