Our project's primary audience is Human-Centered Design (HCD) students, addressing some of the difficulty that comes with generating an idea and choosing topics for projects. The goal of this project was to design a digital platform that reduces decision paralysis and aids students in choosing feasible and relevant research topics.

Research was conducted with current and former HCD students to gain a better understanding of the experience and identify areas of improvement through design. After sending out a survey and conducting interviews to gain insights, we performed qualitative analysis on responses and built a solution. Once the prototype was built, we tested on users for feedback, implemented changes, and created this report.

Team: Andrew Dinspechin, Lindsey Fortier, Apoorv Singh | Course: Intro to UX | Date: December 17, 2025

With HCD students being early in their design journey, many often struggle to identify research topics for assignments and group projects. Throughout the course of the degree, it is often a class requirement to generate ideas for research and work in teams. Since students are just starting to learn the principles of design, it can be difficult to know where to start or how to build a strong foundation.

Key challenges identified:

• Many common problems already have existing solutions, making it harder to generate truly novel ideas
• Problem spaces have 'shrunk', becoming more nuanced and increasingly difficult to ideate for
• Students typically aim to secure roles in industry or continue into academic research
• Building strong portfolios, developing versatile skill sets, and forming professional connections are key factors for success

The uncertainty around project direction can cause indecision and frustration, leading to inefficient time management early in the process. With regard to group projects, these challenges are often amplified when trying to attain consensus on a project's direction, demonstrating a clear need for an organized ideation system.

We proposed a digital platform, titled 'HCIdea', designed to help HCD students discover and refine research topics for academic and portfolio projects. The platform serves as both an idea generator and research library, aggregating existing publications, case studies, and design examples based on the user's interests or team focus.

Key platform features:

• Idea Generation Hub: Browse existing design examples, industry-sponsored projects, and personalized content recommendations with built-in prompts for brainstorming sessions

• Research Analysis & Aggregation: AI-powered synthesis of complex information, creating connection points between related research with centralized idea maps

• UX Project Guidance: AI assistant that helps assess feasibility and novelty of research ideas, identify technical constraints, and provide brainstorming support

• Community Connection: Student profiles highlighting research interests to foster peer-to-peer networking and simplify finding compatible project partners

• Search & Categorization: Smart search tools that filter by industry trends, tags, and personal interests, surfacing different types of data in an intuitive format

By presenting related design solutions, the system assists in highlighting gaps in under-researched opportunities, helping students identify areas with potential for meaningful exploration.

We conducted user research to better understand the needs of design students during the ideation and discovery phase of their projects. To build empathy and understand users better, we distributed a survey and conducted user interviews.

Methodology:

• Survey: Distributed a mixed-methods survey of 11 questions to establish baseline understanding of HCD students, capturing challenges with product ideation, gaps in UX knowledge, and potential issues when forming teams

• User Interviews: Conducted 20-minute unstructured interviews to gain deeper insight into students' thought processes in the context of ideation, understanding pain points, needs, wants, and motivations in more depth

Participant criteria included current and former students in HCD, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), User Experience Design (UX), or related fields, as well as individuals who have worked on assignments requiring project idea generation either individually or in teams.

Our analysis revealed several critical insights about HCD students' ideation challenges:

Idea Generation and Novelty: 77.78% of participants were neutral or found it easy to come up with an idea for a project. However, generating ideas that are truly novel proved more difficult with 77.78% reporting that coming up with something new or original is 'somewhat' or 'very' challenging. This highlights a common struggle to create ideas that feel distinctive in a saturated problem space.

Uncertainty Around Feasibility and Direction: Time constraints and project feasibility were identified as some of the most common problems when generating ideas. Students often struggle to estimate the scope of projects within a semester, making it difficult to manage their time effectively.

Gaps in UX Knowledge and Process Understanding: With many students being early in their design career, understanding design principles and terminology is a common challenge with 88.89% reporting difficulty in this area. 77.78% participants noted the importance of considering their portfolio when selecting an idea, suggesting students understand the value but may not understand the principles needed to achieve it.

Desire for Tools to Support Research and Ideation: Participants expressed strong interest in AI-powered tools to automate research and ideation. Students currently use a variety of platforms: Google for research, Quora for perspectives, ChatGPT for brainstorming, Behance for inspiration, Miro for collaboration, and Figma for prototyping - highlighting an opportunity to streamline these functions.

Teamwork and Collaboration Challenges: 66.67% participants reported difficulty finding fellow researchers or designers to work with. Indecision, lack of communication, and differences in personal interest were ranked highest among sources of friction between teammates.

Based on our research insights, we developed two primary user personas to guide our design decisions.

After analyzing the interview and survey data, we conducted an affinity mapping exercise to identify key themes. The team then collaborated and brainstormed features based on what we had learned. We mapped out the user journey and prioritized features for the MVP.

The primary objective was to assess the learnability, efficiency, and overall user satisfaction of the core platform features with our target users. The evaluation aimed to identify specific usability issues and gather qualitative feedback to inform the next iteration.

Following the usability evaluation, we implemented targeted refinements to address the identified usability barriers and enhance clarity, functionality, and user experience:

• Increased Legibility: Adjusted tool icon text weight and darkened search bar text to improve readability and visual accessibility

• Terminology Clarity: Renamed "Idea Assistant" to "AI Assistant" to better communicate the feature's purpose and align with user mental models

• Visual Hierarchy: Adjusted opacity of section labels on the dashboard to create clearer visual hierarchy and reduce interface noise

• Enhanced Idea Map Interface: Added more icons to the Idea Map toolbelt, making it more dynamic and intuitive for organizing and interacting with content

• Improved Idea Generation Page: Enhanced the idea generator to ensure recommended projects dynamically follow the theme of the generated prompt

• Clearer Content Attribution: Added visible source attribution to the Idea Map page, helping users understand the origin of ideas and research items

These updates directly respond to user feedback regarding confusion around the AI feature, conceptual clarity of the Idea Map, and overall interface polish.

The usability evaluation confirms that the HCIdea platform's core concept strongly resonates with Human-Centered Design students. This is evidenced by the high SUS score of 86.25. Participants validated the need for a centralized tool to support academic ideation and found the basic navigation and standard interactions to be intuitive and efficient.

However, the study also revealed critical usability barriers within several of the platform's unique features. Despite the strong overall impression, task success rates showed that key functions such as the "I got nothing" idea generator and profile editing were not completed successfully by one third of users. Qualitative data indicated that these failures came from mismatched mental models, unclear conceptual labels, and disconnected workflows.

In summary, while HCIdea's foundation is solid and its value proposition is clear, targeted refinements were necessary to ensure its specialized tools are as usable as its core framework.