Digital Civics on Campus
Creating a supportive resource for Asian and Asian-American students on the Purdue campus to utilize during a time when Anti-Asian sentiments and micro-aggressions have increased in light of the coronavirus pandemic
UX Design | August to December 2020
Collaboration with AAARC Purdue
Anti-Asian sentiments and discrimination have been an issue among Purdue students and graduates since long before the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Asian and Asian-American students need some sort of supportive network beyond those currently available at Purdue to utilize when incidents of discrimination arise.
Process
Research & Analysis
Problem Statements, Secondary Research, User Interviews, Co-design
Ideation & Prototyping
Iterative Sketches, Website Design
Feedback & Conclusion
Peer Critiques, Reflections
My Contributions:
Gathering secondary research and synthesizing findings
Conducting interviews with user group
Developing and conducting co-design protocol
Creating interactive website prototype using HTML/CSS &JS
Designing with people: Co-design
The current resources at Purdue reveal a number of deficiencies dealing with person to person contact, and an overall lack of connection.
AAARCC (Asian American and Asian Resource and Cultural Center)
No direct contact with people with similar experiences
It is run by staff rather than students which creates a disconnect
There seems to be difficulty in attracting students to participate in events
The incident report page seems like a way to record the event rather than providing guidance towards support resources
AAA (Purdue Asian American Association club)
Students in the club are divided into different “houses” with one student leader as an event coordinator and mentor
The houses can be very large (30+ students) which can lead to a disconnect between the mentor and mentees. Our team developed a co-design to better address the gaps in the current resource pool.
Goal: Discuss incidents of discrimination and identify what emotions the participants felt, what they did, what they wish they could have done, and most importantly identify what actions would have made a positive difference.
Participants: College students who have experienced anti-Asian sentiments and/or discrimination.
Structure: Our co-design consisted of three activities conducted remotely on a Miro board and Discord. Each activity fulfilled a different aspect of the overall goal of the co-design.
Insights From Co-design
Empowering victims of discrimination to stand up to and educating perpetrators would be more effective and needed than focusing on the perpetrators themselves or the creation of a “safe space”.
People on the receiving end of discrimination have the power to reclaim their identity and stand their ground, they just need the mentorship and guidance to do so. It is difficult to educate random perpetrators during instances of racism because they are not likely to listen or are using their brief knowledge against minorities. The victim may also feel uncomfortable or too angry to start an educational dialogue with the perpetrator.
Having a prepared response to anti-Asian comments would be empowering.
Upon reflection, several of our co-design participants were critical of their responses to anti-Asian behavior while it occurred and wished they had a comeback or a way to educate the perpetrators. In the moment of discrimination, the participants had often felt overwhelmed which prevented them from retaliating at the moment. This would lead to rumination about the incident and regret that they had not taken back their power by replying confidently. Participants felt that having a resource for comebacks would be helpful.
Having a mentor who can relate to their lives would have helped immensely.
Growing up as an Asian American in the 21st century is different from past history. The experience of being an immigrant or the child of immigrants can feel difficult when there are limited easily accessible resources from people with relatable backgrounds, as well as a general lack of representation. Our co-design participants expressed the desire for a mentor while they were younger to guide and empower them from a young age. Furthermore, they expressed an aversion to or lack of desire for a safe space or a large organization as a resource.
Takeaways
We discovered that our participants:
Wanted to feel less isolated
Did not see value in trying to change the racists themselves
Did not feel empowered by reporting options tied to legal authority
Many of their experiences were micro-aggressions (oftentimes from friends, classmates, etc.); “Official” means of reporting were not appropriate in this context
Felt like the environment at Purdue was conducive to people being uncomfortable or hesitant to address or discuss racism, which creates a taboo around it
Felt a need for a means of educating or informing perpetrators, felt pressure to do so themselves during their encounters and blamed themselves for not being able to do so in the heat of the moment (which we believe is not their burden to bare alone, nor is it easy to do)
Felt a lack of social responsibility/accountability when it comes to race-related issues on campus
With this in mind, we decided to change our direction to better suit the underlying issues mentioned above in order to ensure that our design empowered our user group on a deeper, more meaningful level. Furthermore, due to the general lack of awareness and the nature of Purdue’s campus culture, we recognized that there was a need for precursory work to create a basis for further opportunities of empowerment down the road. Something along the lines of a mentorship program may in fact be empowering, however, there is a certain amount of foundational advocacy work that needs to be done in this space to support it.
Sketching for Advocacy
Goal: Visualize and ideate on insights from our co-design, and discuss which directions contain the greatest potential for advocacy. Some questions we asked ourselves:
Does this site provide a platform for action over information?
Is the process simple enough that students will want to use it?
How is this transferring power back into the hands of Asian and Asian-American students?
Site mapping areas/locations of racial incidents
Goal: Show that incidents of Anti-Asian discrimination are happening on campus and to prove that students who experience incidents are not alone, and to show the entire Purdue community that just because it does not effect everyone, it does exist.
How it works: Students would input their information regarding what happened during the incident and where it happened. This would then generate a pin, star, or marker of some sort on a map of campus that could then be shared with anyone via a simple link.
Reporting and discussing incidents
Goal: Similar to site mapping, this is to prove that students who experience incidents are not alone, and that there are things that they can do when in a situation where they face racial injustice.
How it works: students would complete a quick, simple survey explaining in further detail what happened during the incident, how they felt, and what they wish they could have said. Information would then somehow be compiled and showcased for the community to view.
Mentorship and Community
Goal: provide Asian and Asian-American students with a resource where they can have actual conversations about what has happened or is happening to them, again making them feel supported and like they are part of a community.
How it works: students would input their demographic and contact information, as well as what type of connection they are looking to make–counseling, an upperclassmen mentor, and a group or larger community of students with shared experiences. They would then be placed with someone or invited to join the community.
Where do we go now?
Deciding on a direction to take a project can be one of the hardest parts of the design process, and we had three solid options to pursue. In the end, we returned to the questions we asked prior to sketching to decide: Does this site provide a platform for action over information? Is the process simple enough that students will want to use it? How is this transferring power back into the hands of Asian and Asian-American students?
As a team, we deliberated and went back and forth between taking the mentorship and script creation suggestions made in our codesign literally, or whether there was something else driving those forces. We had not yet realized that what these suggestions were pointing at was a need for a sense of unity and the realization that no one situation stands alone--there is a whole community of Asian and Asian-American students who have a shared experience. We moved on to mid-fidelity construction of our designs, still unsure of which focus we wanted to tackle, but knowing that any of them had the potential for empowerment.
Wireframing–”Building Up”
After creating individual mockups of what our site looked like, we came together as a team to choose various elements we wanted to keep, based on our co-design insights and rationale from other research. We chose to create these mockups on Figma, and developed a collaborative mid-fi wireframe to refer to when coding our site.
1. Sharing experiences
2. Slideshow of experiences
3. Incidence map
4. Archive of other’s experiences
5. Sharing the website with others
6. Form to report out experience
After creating mid-fi prototypes and incorporating the main abilities of our websites, we went ahead and added some of the visual elements like a consistent typeface, colors, icons etc to enhance the website and make it look more consistent with the Purdue style guide.
Coding–”Building Out”
After creating mockups for the website in Figma, our team started off by creating a semantic markup of the different pages of the website. We created frameworks and basic design guidelines for fonts and colors to follow while styling the pages using CSS. While working remotely, we practiced collaborative coding, in order to produce a responsive and interactive website, incorporating Javascript.
Heuristic Analysis
Goal: To conduct an inspection of the site to look for design flaws using Nielsen’s design heuristics.
As a team, we chose a simple and time-effective approach to testing for our final product. Using Jakob Nielsen’s design heuristics, we evaluated which of the 10 heuristics were applicable to our site and conducted a heuristic analysis based on those.
The site was tested as a whole--we inspected individual elements but the result heeded was an overall functionality assessment of the site. For each heuristic, the site either passed or failed. Failed elements will be considered in our project reflection but will not be changed for our final design during this project.
Final Design–”Acting Together”
Imagine the user experiences a racially-fueled incident on campus. Their friend had sent them a link to our webpage, so they visit it, immediately seeing the call to action and an option to share. Unsure if they want to share, they proceed to scroll.
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They read through a slideshow of other Asian/Asian-American students’ experiences similar to theirs. They had no idea so many others were experiencing the same thing! They feel less isolated.
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They continue to scroll and see the incidence map of campus. Through it, they are able to see where Anti-Asian sentiments are most concentrated.
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Seeing more information on why they should share and the number of students like them who have shared their stories, they are moved to do the same. They are moved to click “share” and are redirected to the questionnaire on the second page…
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Here, they are able to share their experience, including how they were feeling and what resources they wished they had. This questionnaire feels more personal than most other incident reports they have had to fill out, and they feel like they are supporting others like them by sharing their story. Once they click “share,” they are redirected back to the homepage where they can browse the archive or share the link with their friends.
Now, they feel less helpless and more empowered. They feel like the website could start to raise awareness and spread information on campus about their experiences.
That’s a wrap!
Through our co-design, we realized the importance of empathizing with the people we were designing with and creating a safe space for them to share sensitive or personal experiences and emotions, especially when we couldn’t physically be in the same space as them. We found that small, intentional choices that we made throughout the co-design had a significant impact on the participants’ comfort levels and willingness to share. For example, we gave the participants the option of not turning their cameras or microphones on if they were uncomfortable with it. This meant that we were not able to take note of the participants’ expressions and body language while participating in the co-design activities, however, some of the participants felt more comfortable and willing to share their experiences with us this way, which proved to be invaluable to our project.
In terms of the practical execution of the work, we felt like we were lagging behind a few times and would have benefitted from managing our time better. We would’ve definitely liked to spend more time coding our website. We had to re-think some of the elements that we had initially planned to include in our original vision for the website because we lacked the technical capabilities or time to learn those skills. Despite that, we are proud of the work we have done on this project and the direction it has taken.
This project as a whole has been really instrumental in showing us how digital civics work can be incredibly powerful and impactful while still being simpler than we initially thought. Design doesn’t have to be grand and complex to have a meaningful impact. For this particular project, we learnt that revealing information is radical in its own right, and that sometimes simpler foundational work is needed as a basis for activism. Due to these insights, this experience has made digital civics work seem a lot more accessible or achievable to us, and we are incredibly grateful that we had the opportunity to engage with this space.