Michigan Space Grant Consortium

The Space Grant Consortium was established by Congress, in 1989 . The Michigan Space Grant Consortium (MSGC), at the University of Michigan (UM) is apart of a nation-wide National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funded college and fellowship program that consists of 52 state-based university-led Space Grant Consortium (50 states plus the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). In addition to the University of Michigan, there are a ten other universities in Michigan who all fall under the state MSGC program. The overall program goal of the Space Grant Consortium is to, ‘contribute to the nation’s science enterprise by funding education, research and public engagement projects through a national network of university-based Space Grant consortium’. 

  • Each year NASA publishes participation benchmarks the MSGC must meet in order to stay compliant. In years past The University of Michigan just barely made it over the benchmarks, and they’re searching for ways to increase their rates of URM applicants.

    URM are classified in these groups: African American / Black, Asian Of Hispanic / Latinx, Native American / Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander, Women, LGBTQ+ and Differently abled individuals

  • Timeline : 2018 - 4 months

    Role : Research Lead of a team of 3

    Research Questions :

    • How many URM are currently STEM students and qualify?

    • Have they heard of the Space Grant? How and Why?

    • What would need to change for you to participate?

Data Collection & Analysis

With the project having a clear four month end-to-end schedule. Me and my team of three other researchers created a multi-stage research plan and a lengthy data analysis process. The total discovery period took a little over two and a half months.

  • • Competitive Analysis

    • Heuristic Evaluations

    • Semi-structured Interviews

    • Field Observations

  • The KJ Method which utilizes affinity mapping.

Recommendations

With the synthesis of the data complete, I recognized that most of the issues MSGC was experiencing were centered around the access and accuracy of their marketing and communication. Our data has also uncovered many touchpoints that MSGC could leverage in order to implement a successful re- design and by understanding how to design for multiple touchpoints MSGC can successfully attract and track URM students to the program. 

I suggested adopting a Multi-Touchpoint redesign pilot over two years to (re)establish MSGC’s brand identity, attract and track more students specifically URM and create new innovative student programs. The first year would be the creation of each redesigns and then the second year would be the implementation of the new program.

Multi-Touchpoint (Re)Design

In order to understand my recommendation of a multiple touchpoint experience design, we had to explain how it is the side-effect of independent omnichannel design, service design and user experience (UX) design simultaneously working together. In which we created tailored recommendations for each key branch of the multi-touchpoint experience design.

  • MSGC’s brand must be recognizable in order to attract students, track and build a strong alumni support to the program. Now with new key stakeholders, MSGC had an opportunity to re-brand the entire programs brand identity to fit a more modern audience. The brand identity is made up of the logo, color scheme, tag-lines, and realigning its mission and vision to reflect current goals. They can accomplish this by either hiring a professional to create a new brand package or launch a cross campus student redesign challenge.

  • Redesign current communication channels for easy and information accessibility, add additional communication channels that are used by students here at UM and highlight mentorship resources.

  • UX design is something that is both long and short term and something MSGC can have the most fun with, which is to create an interdisciplinary calendar of events.

Website in 2018

Current Website

Our top overall recommendation was to redesign the website - based off of the competitive analysis, heuristic evaluations and user interviews. Per our recommendation here is the site now: