Graduate Coursework Project
During Fall 2025, as part of my master’s program coursework, I worked on a small team assigned the problem “How to best recruit more graduate students (especially more MTC students) and attract strong PhD applicants into the TCR program?”
For this project, we ultimately focused on developing a blog-like webpage prospective and current graduate students of the Utah State University (USU) Technical Communication & Rhetoric (TCR) program. In order to develop this solution, my team members and I developed forms of open feedback from prospective users, designed user personas, conducted usability testing, and continually worked on improving our solution’s design.
User Personas & Journey Mapping
After sharing a survey with undergraduate students and whiteboard documents with open-ended questions with current graduate students, we used responses to develop three user personas and mapped what their journey’s may be with the current USU TCR webpages. Our user personas includes: a current TCR undergraduate student who is considering graduate school, a young professional with a bachelor’s degree who is considering a master’s degree to bolster their career, and an international student who wants to pursue a PhD. These three personas and their respective journey maps helped my team consider the diversity of user needs and interests that would need to be considered when developing our solution as well as where they may be overlap in terms of what information and support their seeking.
Submitted Design
Using Figma, I designed an initial hi-fi prototype of our blog webpage that was then used during user research sessions. During these sessions, we asked current USU master’s and PhD students to find different information on the page to gauge its usability as well as asked for general design and organization feedback. Making edits informed by user research sessions, I designed an initial prototype as well as a second draft version before developing the final prototype.
This final hi-fi prototype prioritizes USU-specific and general industry information about TCR programs and degrees, giving context to the degree in the workforce and how USU’s degree program specifically could be a good fit for a prospective student. This middle section of the webpage highlights successes of current TCR students and TCR alumni, highlighting the benefits of the program through concrete examples. The bottom of the webpage is primarily informative, linking application information and the faculty contact for the TCR program.
User persona and journey map for a young professional with a bachelors degree who is considering a master’s degree to bolster their career.Wireframing/Lo-Fi Prototype Drafting
Informed by our potential user research responses, our user personas, and our journey maps, team members respectively designed lo-fi prototypes for our solution. For my lo-fi prototype, I used Canva to draft some wireframing of our proposed blog webpage. In this early draft, I prioritized putting concrete information about the TCR graduate programs at the top of the page followed by personality content (i.e. highlighting current TCR students and TCR alumni in “Aggies in TCR” and “What can I do with a TCR degree”) and supplemental program content (i.e. program datain “Why USU is the place to study”).
