Ana Kuster • RCAD Majors

Problem

When prospective students apply to Ringling College, there is a high likelihood that the major they have entered does not truly align with their personal artistic interests. Many students end up switching to a different major in their first year, which often involves "redoing" their first year, resulting in lost time and money.

This was the problem I needed to solve. The brief called for an interactive experience executed within Rive that would recommend a particular major to a student, depending on their responses to a series of questions. On top of this, the experience should also be very engaging and fun to use. With these goals in mind, I began my design and prototyping phase.

Research

My research phase consisted of analyzing current conventional user journeys and UI elements in onboarding processes for most apps and websites. I observed the similarities and differences from one experience to the other, and noted any other observations I made about the way they guide a user through certain questions in order to arrive at a result. I especially noticed that nearly all of the examples I saw used extremely basic button interactions, which reaffirmed the fact that a more fun and unique control scheme in my project would go a long way in memorability, engagement, and visual interest.

Pitch Deck

I presented my concepts to the client for this project, Ringling College's Office of Communications and Marketing. My three design approaches aimed to show a wide range of possibilities for this experience's visual style, as well as how the user would interact with it.

After I showed my ideas, everyone in the room agreed that I should move forward with a mix of concepts #2 and #3: melding the grounded, professional, and clean aesthetic style of concept #2 with the quirky, modern, fresh, and fun compositional style of concept #3. We also touched on how the actual logic of the questions would work, and that in the near future, I would receive a document outlining a few key details regarding Ringling's wording, branding, major-related keywords, etc. With all these points in mind, I proceeded with figuring out how the programming would work.

Rive Prototype

Before I continued further with designing the visuals, I wanted to get the core programming logic out of the way, in order to be able to gauge what I could and couldn't do. My biggest challenge would be to figure out how to trigger certain majors to appear at the end based on whatever combination of responses a user may give.

The solution I found was to utilize Rive's Data Binding feature to keep track of each major's "point" value throughout the experience. Certain responses contribute a specific amount of "points" to each major, and whichever major has the highest amount of points towards the end is the one shown as the final result. I also set up each "scene" as its own Component, which would make it easy to individually edit and work on every scene without affecting the other ones.

Once this coding aspect of the project was done and I had a working prototype, I could finally set aside the programming and refocus on the pure visual design of the experience.

AI-Assisted Point System

To properly test my prototype, I obviously needed to assign point values to each response, for each major. I originally planned to use completely random values, but then I thought of instead asking Microsoft's Copilot to give me the numbers for each of the questions and responses I made. Copilot automatically did its own backend research into the topics and Ringling's majors, and it gave me data tables that would somewhat accurately align with what each response meant and how it should contribute points to each major.

I had only used this as a quick way to get a couple of points for each major, but after seeing how well it explained its reasoning, I figured this would work as a good foundation for the point system in the actual project file. I moved forward with this in mind as a potential tool to use. (Still need to discuss AI point system with clients.)