Step UP Connection Platform
Project status
Collaborators
Anna Delaney, MD
Cindy Christian, MD
Suzanne Rose, MD, MS.Ed
Andrew Parambath
Innovation leads
Opportunity
At any given moment, there are hundreds of projects across the University of Pennsylvania that need support and thousands of students looking for ways to get involved.
Traditional approaches to making connections between students and faculty are manual, time-consuming, fragmented, and frustrating. Students don't know where to search for projects or share their skills and showcase themselves as good candidates, and faculty don't have a way to advertise their needs.
This issue was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic when the number of efforts underway by Penn faculty rapidly expanded and stay-at-home orders were put in place – halting the casual interactions between faculty and students that often lead to collaboration.
Intervention
Step UP is a self-service web application that acts as a virtual marketplace, matching volunteers from the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine with initiatives that need staffing. Faculty users can create listings to recruit volunteers to support their projects and students can create profiles that detail their skill set and availability and apply to support projects.
Impact
Since launching at the Perelman School of Medicine, Step UP has been well-utilized by faculty and staff, facilitating matches that help faculty move work forward and students gain invaluable experience. It is also being used to support mentorship opportunities. For example, Penn Medicine's Radiology Residency program uses the platform to match residents with faculty mentors.
Innovation Methods
Show me
Show me
We leveraged screenshare to conduct “guided think-aloud observations” of users interacting with the Step UP connection platform.
This helped us understand how users interacted with the product and identify confusing or missed features.
Show me
Instead of relying on a verbal recount of experience, ask users to show you how they use a product or service. What people say they do is often quite different than what they do.
Observing users in action will help you understand the spectrum of experiences users can have with the same product or service.
Surveys, interviews, questionnaires, and focus groups don’t tell you what you need to know. Prompting users to show instead of tell often reveals what others have missed.
Fake back end
Fake back end
Fake back end
It is essential to validate feasibility and understand user needs before investing in the design and development of a product or service.
A fake back end is a temporary, usually unsustainable, structure that presents as a real service to users but is not fully developed on the back end.
Fake back ends can help you answer the questions, "What happens if people use this?" and "Does this move the needle?"
As opposed to fake front ends, fake back ends can produce a real outcome for target users on a small scale. For example, suppose you pretend to be the automated back end of a two-way texting service during a pilot. In that case, the user will receive answers from the service, just ones generated by you instead of automation.
Fake back end
We launched a simple landing page offering faculty and staff the option to advertise and apply for volunteer opportunities in the spring of 2020 when COVID-19 efforts needed support.
More than 50 projects were posted to the platform in the first 30 days, and several matches were made. Users rated their experience highly and shared feedback about their experience.
Piloting a bare-bones version of the website helped us validate demand for the service. It also enabled us to gather insights about the features users needed before investing in the development of a fully functional platform.