help in the face of a pandemic.
In early 2021, we worked with a top Group of Eight (Go8) university and used human-centred design (HCD) to speak with international students stuck overseas due to the pandemic. We wanted to understand their lived experience of online learning. We assumed there would be surface-level issues like Zoom fatigue, lack of connection with students, and timezone complexities.
However, through conversations that focused on the students, we found deeper issues, concerns, and anxieties that they had, such as:
Craving independence
Learning a new language and culture
Wanting to broaden their perspectives through new experiences
Wanting to experience the transformations that come from studying abroad!
For these students, coming to Australia to study was about more than getting a degree and job, and sadly they were missing out on these opportunities.
Where traditional market research would have stopped at the surface-level problems that we’d assumed, the HCD approach helped us understand the deeper level of these issues, allowing us to connect with these students and have them feel heard by the university.
pretotyping pain points to solve problems.
The students told incredible stories of difficult situations they were facing while trying to successfully complete their studies. These in-depth conversations provided us with rich insights and underlying reasons for the problems. These insights were the basis of our ideation and brainstorming, where we came up with hundreds of ideas and opportunities that could solve the problems we found.
Our challenge was to see how we could provide some of these opportunities while dealing with the border closures. This is where Pretotyping came in.
We used Pretotyping to test several different ideas with these students and measured their continued engagement. Ideas where engagement dropped off were stopped, and those where it continued (over several experiments) were flagged for further investigation and implementation, focusing on solutions that would improve the experience for these students.
an outcome that mattered.
Before this project, students felt the university had abandoned them because they were stuck overseas and only cared about receiving tuition fees.
After the project, every student we spoke to felt the university listened and cared about their situation. They appreciated the opportunity to be heard.
HCD helped us engage and connect with the students, and with the systematic approach of Pretotyping, we cut through hundreds of ideas using data and evidence of engagement.
Several passed ideas were approved for further investigation and testing, while some were implemented by different teams at the university — creating happier students overall.
Pretotyping helps you quickly get to winning solutions that really matter to your customers.
