Idea Board
Idea Board is a more exploratory project that started with the vision of a physical sticky-board space for Princeton affiliates to post ideas and collaborate. The aim was to boost entrepreneurship on campus and facilitate collaboration on projects. It balances the needs of students, professors and alumni along with the vision of the Keller Center and Prospect Student Ventures.
At A Glance
Team
- Jane Castleman '24
- Catherine Chen '23
- Audrey Laude '22
- Warren Quan '25
Collaborators
- Keller Center
- Prospect Student Ventures
Tools
- Figma
Methods
- User Interviews
- User Surveys
- User Personas
Timeline
Ongoing
Problem
How can we create a sustainable idea board where Princeton students can pursue and complete their ventures?
Research
Speaking with students and professors.
We received funding from the Keller Center to perform user research with a focus on user interviews. In order to incentivize students from all across campus to participate in our process, we used our funding to co-run an event with the Coffee Club, offering 6 dollar coffee vouchers to students willing to participate in a 15-minute interview. Our script aimed to address three main questions: (1) What would motivate students to use the Idea Board? (2) Which part would they be most interested in (learning / collaborating / finding ideas, which stage of a project, etc.) (3) How much of a concern is intellectual property / how could we mitigate this? We interviewed around 20 students and used our findings to present to the Keller Center and inform our ideation process. We also spoke with Prospect Student Ventures and Professor Danner (a professor in entrepreneurship) to gather further insights. From these findings, we decided to narrow our scope to focus on a digital space to help connect people to people and people to ideas (with ideation as a secondary priority). This way, students can connect with new group members or find projects, as well as receive feedback from alumni or participants for user testing.
Ideation
Exploring different layouts.
We ideated different layouts for the two main use cases: people with ideas searching for people, and people searching for ideas to work on. To serve this need, we decided to have a space to post ideas (in a “sticky note” or lit format) and also have a space for students to make “profiles” where they can provide information about themselves and what they are interested in working on.
We conducted market research on platforms including Google Keep, Milanote, Trello, and LinkedIn Jobs to compare how they employ card-based content displays. These sites have different methods of creating cards, searching for cards, and static versus dynamic card organizations. Using this research as well as feedback from our design crit, we thought about the most effective way to organize our sticky notes given the purpose of the Idea Board.
Reflection
Gaining inspiration.
The main challenge in this project was taking the influx of information and narrowing down the scope. Furthermore, because there were no existing solutions, we had to draw on similar products (but not perfect matches) for market research and complete many iterations of designs in order to build a solution.