Michigan Hillel

UX Research

Project Overview

UM Hillel has had a tradition of hosting Shabbat dinners for students or reimbursing them for coffee dates in order to enrich their lives after school and give them a better experience of traditional Jewish holidays. However, with the increase in the number of student members and activities, there are many cases that need to be reimbursed, and because of the rigorous reimbursement process, it usually takes UM Hillel staff 2-4 weeks to process them. In order to get students reimbursed faster and streamline their reimbursement process, they decided to make some changes to optimize the whole process.

Case Summary

Product Vision

A new system for Michigan Hillel to implement for their reimbursement and tracking, or recommendations on how to improve upon their current system. They would use the feedback and recommendations to update their system to be more effective for students and our own tracking.

Discovered User Problem

Stakeholders of UM Hillel are often overwhelmed by the volume of reimbursement work. The complexity of the process and a number of other potential problems resulted in long reimbursement times and extensive workloads, causing delays for the students requesting reimbursement.

Outcomes

Improvement recommendations for the poor communication and tracking system within the UM Hillel team, that showcases researched solutions based on UX methodologies. Though solutions could not be tested and iterated because of the nature of the project being student consulting.

The Process

The Team (Heyday)

We are a team of UX Grad students at University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI). We worked, learned and communicated as a team throughout this process.

My Role

I served as the team's editor during the semester. My duties included:

Editing Documents
Proofreading Documents
Helping communication between non-native English speakers

On top of my duties as an editor, like my team, researched, ideated and designed to meet our clients end goals.

Rebekah Lim (Project Manager)
Tyler Thomas
Fan Xu
Xintong Li
Yiwen Yang

Gathering Insights

Client Meeting

1 Week

At the beginning of our task to understand our clients issue we client meeting. We did this to understand better the problem and get more familiar with our client. Our key takeaways were:
‍

Structure of the reimbursement system
Initial problems facing the client stakeholders
Client is open and communicative

Background Research Report

3 Week

Each group member was tasked with doing research for our client with different spheres to research.

Research Spheres

Michigan Hillel History
Michigan Hillel Reimbursement
Reimbursement in Other Organizations
Streamlining Processes (My Research)

Findings

Michigan Hillel's history and organizational structure
Michigan Hillel's reimbursement foundations
Competitors best practices
Streamlining a process should be organized into several steps

PDF Link

Interviews

4 Week

To better understand how to achieve these goals, the research team set out to conduct a series of seven one-on-one interviews with users & stakeholders in the reimbursement system.

Key Takeaways

Methods

One-on-one interviews
Interview Protocol

Findings

How to iterate on interview protocol. Interviews took several weeks so we could change and alter to get more accurate findings.
How to conduct an interview and be able to spontaneously make questions

PDF Link

Infinity Mapping of Interviews

2 Weeks

We spent a great deal of time annotating then sorting the notes from our interviews. This lead us to better understand the process, client communication issues and user concerns.

PDF Link

Final Report

3 Week

Findings

Miscommunication between stakeholders in the reimbursement and tracking process
Repeated work, inconsistent standards and human error
Venmo has a transfer limit, causes delayed reimbursement
Students want to get updates if something goes wrong

Recommendation (Paper)

(a) Stakeholders input dates and signatures when they finish their step in the process
(b) Standardize terms they use for reimbursement
(a) Executive Director relinquishes some authority
(b) Stakeholders should set the same standard(allowed items)
N/A
N/A

Recommendation (Electronic)

(a) Create a Google Doc link for each submission and use Google Drive folders to differentiate the steps in the process
(b) Standardize terms they use for reimbursement
N/A
Add other options such as Zelle
Give updates if something goes wrong causing the delay by using the tracking system

PDF Link

Want to get in touch?
Drop me a line!

Reach me at:

thomas.tyler222@gmail.com

1-517-402-0544

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Michigan Hillel