The first case study I ever wrote taught me how not to write case studies
Title: Peer Support Centre (PSC)— an attempt at a case study on service design
My role: Branding and graphic design, content creation, strategy development, volunteer recruitment, training, trying to convince people I had the capabilities to do UX research
Target users: Undergraduate and graduate students at McGill (~18–30 years of age)
Over the course of my 4 years in college, I was involved in building up a student mental health support service called the Peer Support Centre (PSC). The experience was akin to developing a start-up: we saw a problem in our community — the high rates of depression and suicide amongst university students — and tried to build a product (a health service in this case) to address it. Our service was a one-on-one, face-to-face active listening service run by students, for other students to talk about anything going on in their lives. Our service was borne out of necessity, to supplement professional counselling resources that often had long wait times and were inaccessible to many students.
Study methodology for learning about writing case studies:
- Work at PSC, build up a student service eventually used by hundreds of students a year
- Write a case study about the experience, exaggerate capabilities as a UX researcher
- Fail to convince anybody
- Reflect. Iterate. Learn from mistakes.
Working at PSC was the experience that catapulted my interest in using design as a tool to solve problems. Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, when I started to do my soul searching in regards to the kind of career I wanted to build, and the types of problems I wanted to solve in the world, my experience creating a health service for students at PSC steered me towards the field of service design and UX research.
I wrote about working at PSC as one of my first case studies in the first iteration of my portfolio when I began to apply for jobs and internships. You can read a draft of it here. I made a lot of mistakes when I crafted the narrative about my work at the PSC — at the time, I was extremely insecure about my lack of concrete UX-related experience and desperate to get my foot in the door. I rebranded our program evaluation tools as being UX research conducted by our organization on the student body, and I was intentionally ambiguous about my specific role in the research we were doing. Of course, anybody who knows what they’re doing in UX could see right through my facade.
In reality, the role I actually played in building PSC was more in branding and strategy development. I never worked directly in program evaluation — the facet of our organization that actually deployed surveys to collect feedback or developed questionnaires to measure student satisfaction with the service. At the time I lacked the skills necessary to handle the quantitative analysis on the data we were collecting. I did however, contribute my skills towards crafting the image and the brand of our service in its early days.
I designed the logo using internal feedback from our team, and built a presence on social media so that we could communicate directly with our users. At first, I created a lot of the promotional materials that we used to advertise our presence across campus — posters, business cards, bookmarks. I learned how to create a voice for our service that spoke to the students we wanted to help. Slowly, I moved from organizational branding to strategy development. First, we needed a team to handle all the responsibilities we were taking on in marketing our service. I crafted and recruited for the roles that were necessary to fill out the volunteer team that would handle graphic design, on-campus communications, and social media marketing for PSC.
In my last year of university, I took on the role of being a co-chair for the organization. I devoted myself to developing key strategies that would improve efficiency within our organization, and ensure our service’s sustainability on campus. I led two main projects, working with a team of 9 other student volunteers, to ensure these two goals. Working with our program evaluation coordinator, I developed the framework for our first volunteer database — a storage system that stored records of training evaluations for our 70+ volunteers. We had problems in the past with not having a system in place for measuring our volunteers’ progress over time as peer supporters, and no paper trail on the performance of our volunteers within the organization. The purpose of our storage system was to consolidate information on all our volunteers and allow easy access from relevant stakeholders.
To ensure that our service would continue to have the means to train and deploy support services for years to come, I organized a campaign to have a student fee adopted during our fall referendum. The student fee, about $0.65 per student, was voted in unanimously by our student body. It grew our annual budget from $8,000 to $16,000, guaranteeing institutional stability at McGill. Because of these efforts, the PSC went from crowdsourcing donations for money, to having a guaranteed annual budget that would allow us to continue providing an accessible support service for years to come.
Although I worked in branding and strategy development for PSC, I always listened closely to the feedback and data we were gathering from students who used the service. Back then, I didn’t direct the scope of our research, but I used our data to inform the branding and voice we used in our promotional materials. When we held a marketing specific focus group on our content, I used the feedback to direct the creation of a poster series that was more diverse and appealing to the diverse student body we were serving. When I took on chairing our organization, I constantly reviewed the results of our ongoing post-session feedback questionnaires to identify pain-points that could be addressed in our training. For example — when we saw a lower satisfaction score amongst international students, I pushed for a specific training session on unique problems faced by international students for our volunteers.
Listening to and internalizing feedback from the students who used or saw our service on campus was the first time I realized that the end user is an integral part of the design process. Moving between content creation and strategy development at PSC was the first time I realized that “design” doesn’t always entail the things we see on the surface — “design” could encompass designing entire systems, processes, and teams to improve users’ experiences.
At PSC, I never had the opportunity to scope and design surveys, run focus groups, or conduct user testing on our web platform — although I wish I had. But UX research is all about iterating. Working at PSC was my first iteration in research where I witnessed how user insight can be used to inform all aspects of an organization, from branding to marketing to service design itself. I’ve learned a lot since then — now I design, execute, and analyze data from surveys constantly. I’ve even started building data models for a research pipeline at the startup I work at. I’ve presented digital products at meet-ups for user feedback, and moderated user tests to collect information on pain-points during a user journey. I constantly advocate for our end users at my current job, and am always looking for creative, resource-efficient methods to gather feedback from them because I’ve seen firsthand at PSC how user insights can make a product better.
UX research is all about iteration. So is life.
