Enhancing Student Ministry
The Challenge: Greek Ministry is a difficult ministry to staff with little visibility into what is going on and students who struggled to find the resources available to them.
The Goal: Design a companion app for Greek student leaders that enhances ministry. It results in leaders feeling more organized and staff having more accurate data about Greek InterVarsity impact.
My Role: Product Designer
Discover
Students
Despite attending trainings, leaders still felt unsure of their ability to lead.
Students were often unprepared due to the difficulty of getting to preparation materials.
Leaders are often leaders in many organizations. With so much to keep track of, the needs of their members could fall through the cracks.
Staff
Staff aren’t allowed in Greek houses, so the student leader is their only source of input – as long as a student remembers to share.
Greek staff are often spread across many campuses; keeping track of how each chapter ministry is doing is mentally overwhelming. Each staff had their own version of a spreadsheet.
Previous efforts included user research with developed personas, however, none no one had explored the angle of what the life of a student leader was like in a semester. I took this opportunity to host an exploratory workshop where we took the persona information and aligned to a semester.
Prior User Research
We discovered the life of a student leader over the course of a year.
Design
Outline
Many designers start with wireframes - but for years I’ve used a slightly adjusted process where I start with an outline of the major sections on each screen, essentially information architecture for mobile apps.
This helps make sure what my product owner is expecting and what I’m anticipating to design will be aligned.
With this in place, I could begin the next layer of detail and wireframe the major parts of each screen.
Database
Because I have a background in computer science and systems analysis, I put together an initial draft of the data model.
This would help me make sure that as I designed screens going forward, I was careful to only include content that we had agreed upon would be present in the database.
If at this point you are thinking to yourself, “What a nerd.” You are pegging me correctly.
Testing
Even though I had Greek leadership explaining Greek ministry to me during our exploratory workshop, they had forgotten to explain a core framework to me that everything about a Greek Chapter Ministry revolves around:
Inviting
Prepping
Hosting
Follow Up
My initial wireframes accounted for none of that! I started sketching on the back of my paper what a revised home screen would be like with all this new information.
Hearing from students
Initially I was limited to a focus group. I’d rather talk to people 1:1, but that was all the conference planners would allow. It didn’t matter though because no one showed up 😅.
Time to improvise! I quickly put together a card sort test that we could text to students instead and nabbed a table where I could have students take a look while they waited in line for food. They were shown different versions of the app– one that emphasized relationships, and one that emphasized the new cycle I had learned about.
“The book doesn’t quite follow how I actually work.”
“I am a student leader, work a job, and have to do school work — the more it can help me be organized, the better.”
With massive preference, students wanted the app to help them stay organized. After working through the card sort results and qualitative feedback, we cut several features and reworked the outline.
Iterating
Students had expressed a desire for the app to also include the study guide from the physical book. However, Greek Leadership asked for the study guide to be pulled from the app.
We had a choice before us:
We could offer the guide in the app, as asked for by students, so that they would always have their study guide on them. This would increase our development time and content management time to add a significant amount of content.
We could not offer the guide in the app, as asked for by staff to reap the benefits of studying by book instead of studying by phone. This would be much shorter development time.
We obviously want to listen to our students, but we also want to instill responsibility into our students. Sometimes that means not giving them what they asked for. How do we choose?
Proposal 1 leaned on the value of student feedback and ease of accessibility at expense of a longer build time.
Proposal 2 leaned on the value of responsibility and good habits and a shorter build time at the expense of student feedback.
While it was a sticky decision, we decided we would wait to see what more widespread feedback was and could build the study guide in later.
Develop
With the revised outline and Greek’s Visual Brand, we were ready to design the rest of the app and build functional specifications.
Pilot Test
We wanted to learn whether the app made a difference in student leaders’ ministries and what would be required for the app to be accelerated to a wider range of Greek Chapter Ministries.
To run the test, we set up 8 students over 8 weeks:
A baseline survey for the beginning of the study.
Bug reporting mechanism
Midpoint survey and interviews
Completion survery and interviews
“It REALLY complements the physical Bible study guide.”
“I would never use the prep videos before, but it’s nice to have them built into the app.”
“The app kept me excited to have the study and prodded me when I lost motivation.”
students said they tracked more often
PREPARED MORE OFTEN THAN IN PRIOR SEMESTERS
WOULD RECOMMEND THE APP TO OTHER LEADERS
Final Reflections
I loved the idea of building a digital companion to something physical. I think it’s important that we as designers are thoughtful about the benefits and drawbacks of digital transformation.
