Overview

Balancing education and parenthood can be challenging, and students with children may feel isolated without sufficient support from their educational institution. 

Research indicates that studying parents prioritise flexibility, often opting for online options. However, many tertiary providers disregard their desire for connection and on-campus experiences. 

Time, financial constraints, and the emotional burden of balancing family responsibilities can lead some students to postpone or abandon their studies.

This case study is the Capstone project for my UX Master's program, carried out in collaboration with the University PhD student, our expert advisor on postpartum wellbeing, Emma Tempest.

Challenge

Our challenge was to design a product that would improve the studying and social experiences for students with children at the Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), enhancing its appeal as a preferred choice for this group.

Solution

With online and hybrid learning models becoming a new norm, we wanted to approach the challenge holistically and address physical and digital environments to make a seamless experience for students on- and off-campus. 

Our solution included two elements:

• A website to provide students with an understanding and feel of the physical space on the VUW campus designed for studying parents, its purpose and amenities.

This online platform allowed parent students to participate in virtual activities and connect with others through the Noticeboard feature when they could not attend the campus.

• A concept guideline for the physical space called Manaaki Hub is designed to cater to the primary needs of studying parents with four areas for connecting, resting, learning, and caring for children's needs.

Initial Research

We immersed ourselves in secondary research to understand people's experiences and changes when they become parents. It involved reviewing academic articles and study results and engaging with New Zealand postpartum groups and parenting communities on social media. Additionally, we explored related videos and podcasts. 

We audited the VUW website content to see what support students with children can find. It was discovered that the tone of voice on the website communicated bringing children on campus was a potential disruption to lectures allowed only under specific circumstances with prior arrangements. The website and campus navigation were time-consuming, and the support needed to be tailored to the parents' needs. 

Additionally, we collected photographs of existing areas on campus designated for students with children, highlighting their inaccessibility, uninviting setup, and difficult wayfinding. 

Expert Interviews

By speaking with the experts, we wanted to:

• Understand the challenges faced by new parents and studying parents.

• Explore what support VUW provides to the parent students and identify possible improvements.

Highlight

We crafted interview guides individually based on each participant's area of expertise. Despite having many overarching themes, we realised we should have standardised interview guides as it took a lot of work to distinguish the common patterns during the analysis stage.

Empathy Interviews with Parents

Experts' insights guided us in conducting empathy interviews with parents who are currently studying or have studied in the past while pregnant or with children aged 0-5 years. We differentiated the guides slightly for birthing and non-birthing parents.

We analysed both rounds of interviews separately, finding the patterns and deriving insights from them. We grouped all insights into three main categories. It helped us define the problem and move to the ideation stage.

It would be nice to know that having your baby on campus is okay. It's unspoken; no one would say you have to get that baby out of here. But at the same time, there's no dialogue about if it's culturally acceptable to bring your kid into school.

Now it is just luck. If you happen to have supervisors and people around you who are carers, who support you and are interested in you, then you have a good experience.

The challenges were lack of time and sleep, missing out. We had a lot of single students who would go to meet-ups or networking events. I would have to miss out on those, which made me feel that I was not studying to my full potential.

User Groups

Our research revealed the incredible diversity within the parents' community at the University and the wide range of their life circumstances and needs. Using the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, we identified three main user groups.

Conceptualisation

Based on our research, we established the design principles to guide our solution.

The insights revealed a lack of information for expecting and parent students within the VUW. Most support provided to the students was ad hoc and inconsistent in approach. We saw the opportunity for more consistent and accessible information.

Solution

Our team decided to create a digital information hub to meet the needs of pregnant and postpartum students. The Hub would provide tailored information about relevant support services. We worked on information architecture and created low-fidelity prototypes for the main functions. 

Following the concept discussion with our expert advisor, it became evident that while the solution could work for VUW, it had an excessive information focus and lacked a community perspective. This prompted us to reevaluate the project's direction.

Design Analogues 

Our group compared existing student support structures at VUW, focusing on services like Disability, International Support, Pacifika Hub, and Āwhina Māori Student Support. We wanted to identify aspects of these services that we could adapt to support students with children.

Building Solution

As the physical aspect of our solution was conceptual, we focused on building and testing the website and getting users' ideas on what amenities, areas, and services they would expect to see in the space designed for studying parents.

We created the user flow and sitemap, planned the information architecture and created lo-fi prototypes, re-using relevant initial solution sketches and wireframes to save us time. 

The website's primary purpose was to foster community and connection, encouraging people to visit the physical space if they were able/willing to while ensuring they could connect with other studying parents remotely. 

With this in mind, we prioritised building the Homepage, the page for one of the four Hub spaces, the Calendar page and the "Learning together" page, as these were the website's key features to test. After getting the go-ahead from our stakeholders, we began usability testing.

Usability Testing

We conducted two rounds of usability testing with the mobile version of Low- and High-fidelity prototypes to gather studying parents' feedback at the different project stages. 

Round One: Wireframes

Goals:

• Check the connection between the physical space and the website is clear.

• Check the navigation and features make sense to the users.

• Check the key terminology is easy to interpret.

• Identify what features users would like to have in the physical Hub.

Highlight

The parents identified the desired physical space features:

• A kitchen

• Socialising areas with comfortable seating

• Private rooms for feeding and changing 

During this time, we developed a design guide for Manaaki Hub digital products, including voice and tone guidelines, a colour palette, a logo, website components, a typography scale, and illustrations.

Manaaki Hub Tour

Manaaki Hub on campus offers different spaces to support studying parents:

The Manaaki Hub website helps students get the "feel" of on-campus space, connect and participate in events and activities.

Seeing Results

Survey results filled out by our users:

Our expert advisor helped us to distribute the stakeholder report among experts in accessible postpartum design in Aotearoa New Zealand, to continue the conversation around the education accessibility for students with children.