GA Directory: A Community of 30,000+ Alumni
PRODUCT DESIGN
USER RESEARCH
PROTOTYPING
UX DESIGN
General Assembly’s community is a global network of entrepreneurs, practitioners, and participants invested in each other’s success and empowered to pursue the work they love. These are our students, instructional team members, and alumni network. We discovered they needed a place build their identities and stay connected; Directory was designed to fulfill this need.
Applying Maslow’s Hierarchy —
What can we learn from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in order to build a successful online community? Understanding our users’ basic needs helped clarify our product goals and priorities. GA Directory was our proposed solution to fulfill the basic physiological, security & safety, and social needs for our customers; it would be the foundation in which we would grow our community.
Understanding the Membership Lifecycle —
Now that we have an idea of users’ basic needs, what does that look like for a community over time? What do we pay attention to during students’ journeys into becoming alumni and professionals in the industry?
Within the membership lifecycle of a GA student/alumni, we want to develop a product that would address the needs of Visitors and Novices. GA Directory would be a portal to other community products that allowed the Regulars, Leaders, an Elders to thrive.
User Research —
Our user research goal was to understand the needs and pain points of the community. We interviewed students who were currently enrolled in full and part-time courses, alumni who recently graduated, alumni who graduated approximately a year ago, and current instructors. We developed Primary and Secondary personas for the student/alumni group; most instructors fell into a third persona that would need further research.
Key Takeaways —
Based on the research on our community and their behaviors, and our study of comparative communities, our key goals for community were the following:
+ Give members an identity (profile)
+ Allow members to evolve their identity (actions)
+ Acknowledge members achievements/contributions (forms of validation)
+ Allow for members to take on roles
GA Directory Beta —
Our Beta product allows for basic functionality such as searching through an Index of GA member profiles, filters (based on Name, Course, Campus, Location, Skill, etc), profile creation, and messaging between users.
Directory Index View of All Profiles
Directory User Profile
Inviting a fellow classmate to Directory
