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
Michael Li, Sonia Batheja, Urszula Oszczapinska, Amy Choi, and Ananya Sriram
Carnegie Mellon has a fairly decentralized way of managing research opportunities. Research opportunities are scattered across different department websites, inaccessible spreadsheets and forms, etc. This makes it quite difficult for undergrads to find, explore, inquire about, and apply to different research opportunities.
For this project the ResearchLink team primarily collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University's Office of Undergraduate Reasearch and Scholarly Development (OURSD↗). We were in contact with Director Dr. Richelle Bernazzoli, Associate Director Dr. Paige Zalman, and Scholar Development Coordinator Alex Johnson. We had the privilege of interviewing OURSD to gain insights into the current state of undergraduate research at CMU.
OURSD empowers students through personalized advising.
OURSD provides individualized guidance to help students identify and pursue research opportunities that align with their interests.
Students pursue research for personal interest and professional advancement.
Student motivations vary, but personal interest and career development were the two primary reasons students express for pursuing on-campus research.
Students are overwhelmed by the number of potential starting points when locating research.
Limited student responses hinder accurate tracking of research participation and satisfaction.
Our team sent out a survey to undergraduate students at CMU. We received 32 responses with representation from 8 different schools across the university.
Participants were categorized by major, year, past and current experience with research on campus.
Discover the motivations behind students doing undergraduate research.
Discover the past challenges and experience that our participants face with research on-campus.
Determine the current process with OURSD in research-finding (both helpfulness and challenges).
Each team member met with a student on campus and conducted a think-aloud interview. This style of interviewing allowed us to gain valuable insights into how students actually go about finding research and what role OURSD played in the process.
Understand what resources students are aware of.
Understand what students need when going through general resources.
Recognize what students pay attention to when narrowing down projects.
Evaluate whether it was easy to establish contact.
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. Each of the group members did their own affinity diagramming then we came together to condense and find any key takeaways.
Insights from affinity diagramming were summarized into a user journey map. We identified the actions users take as well as their thoughts, needs, and pain points at each phase of the process of finding research.
After completing our research phase, the ResearchLink team began ideating how we might design a solution for the problem. We conducted various activities such as Crazy 8's, Reverse Assumptions, Impact Matrices, and Storyboarding. Ultimately, we were able to distill a few key objectives for our intended solution.
We shared and compared our wireframes and address what UI or design decisions we should move forward with. Each team member then conducted a think-aloud interview to decide what we need to improve upon.
Evaluate how easily users can locate the site.
Understand what kind of information users expect to get from the modules.
Find what materials students should prepare before applying.
Are the email templates helpful?
Understand what kind of information they expect to get from the modules.
How would users begin the process of locating relevant information.
Who would you contact regarding these opportunities?
Where would you find resources like email/resume templates?
A step-by-step process that would give students a much clearer understanding how to approach finding research.
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.
This page also encourages student research participation in the arts and humanities which is currently underrepresented at CMU.
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.
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!