Participating in undergraduate research allows students to explore areas of interest, connect with campus faculty, and gain major experience outside of the classroom. It's a valuable learning and growth opportunity that many undergraduate students seek and benefit from. ResearchLink aims to connect students with these opportunities by making information easily accessible in a centralized location.
9 months, Sep 2024 – May 2025
UX Designer
Michael Li, Sonia Batheja, Urszula Oszczapinska, Amy Choi, and Ananya Sriram
The ResearchLink site, embedded in the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Development (OURSD) website, provides a centralized hub of resources, information, and transparency into the research-finding process.
This feature was highly requested by our research participants. The checklist acts as a high level overview of the necessary materials students need to prepare when beginning their research journey.
Email template help students feel more confident when establishing that initial contact with professors.
The OURSD contact page directs more students to OURSD staff’s for help finding research through a more personalized approach.
Research on campus is very different for disciplines (Arts, STEM, English) and it’s important to provide an overview of what research for each discipline is like.
For this project the ResearchLink team primarily collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University's Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholar Development (OURSD↗). We had the privilege of interviewing OURSD to gain insights into the current state of undergraduate research at CMU.
I had a chance to personally interview students in addition to the survey sent out to various departments. I consolidated my findings with the team and we discovered that lack of communication, and lack of information were key pain points shared by most users.
We decided to use this model because we had to organize large amounts of qualitative data. We summarized the clusters in "I need" or "I want" statements to get a more concrete takeaway of user needs and pain points. From this process we discovered that what students want most out of our solution is a centralized location for information about finding research and insights into the process.
I created this user journey map to represent users' thoughts, needs, and pain points at each phase of the process based on insights from previous interviews. Some common issues were the structure of information and getting into contact with the appropriate people.
After completing our research phase, the ResearchLink team began ideating how we might design a solution for the problem. A platform with templates would be the most impactful and feasible solution.
Simple navigation and digestible information at a glance is integral to the success of this site and encouraging students to interact with the site.
Through Think Aloud usability testing, we discovered the nested structure hid important information that users wanted to be able to access immediately, so we brought these resources to the front landing page.
In order to implement the website onto the OURSD website, we moved the contents to Framer and handed it off to OURSD along with a guide to using Framer and the components in our site. In our final conversations with OURSD staff we discussed implementing the modules through an iFrame on the OURSD website.
As of Fall 2025 ResearchLink is available on the OURSD website and being used as a tool in classrooms today!
Being a part of ResearchLink was not only a chance for me to get to know some amazing people but also a valuable experience that taught me how to conduct user research and design effective solutions to real-world problems. Collaborating with an interdisciplinary team meant each member brought their own information and experiences that helped us inform our final output. Special thanks to the ResearchLink team lead by Michael Li and all the super helpful and cooperative staff at OURSD that trusted us with designing a solution to help empower CMU students to participate in research at CMU!