In the Autumn of 2023 we were delighted to welcome two University of Warwick third year Psychology BSC students to our team. The second year we’ve been involved in the University’ placement scheme we were excited to see what they could achieve.
As a bit of background, The University of Warwick supportstheir students to gain workplace experience, complete a third year project and gain credits towards their final grades by spending one term of their third year at an industry placement. Typically we’ll produce a project brief, invite students to apply and then select the best candidates for the brief based on some agreed criteria.
This year our project brief consisted of delivering some user experience research for our in-development application, Barli. A behavioural design planning tool and system that we’ve been developing in-house for the past couple of years. Their objective was to identify research participants from the world of behavioural research and design and run focus groups or interviews with participants about the application’s user journey,digest their feedback and turn that into an actionable brief of improvements.
We were delighted to welcome Diya and Chiamaka to the team and they were very keen to get stuck in, starting out by producing a research brief for us to review and work through. We agreed how they would target participants and what sort of profile of research participants would be ideal for testing. They quickly went away and started the process of finding peopleto participate. They used a combination of LinkedIn and other public resources to find people who were willing to participate and provide insights from their work.
We discovered along the way that the world of behavioural research is very geographically spread with experts found from Finland, Canada and closer to home. The students produced a step through of the application,allowing participants to gain an understanding of it’s overall purpose and objectives. They gathered feedback from each participant in a series of interviews and then provided those results back to us as a set of useful insights we could use for general application improvements.
Overall we were very impressed with the students dedication and investment in the process, they had to overcome a number of obstacles, not least managing multiple time zones, the complexity of finding research participants and the short timelines required of the placement. We’d certainly recommend involving yourself in a similar programme if you’re considering how you can support young graduates in finding experience in the workplace.
