For one of my design classes in undergrad, I worked with four other students throughout the course of the semester to address a problem we observed on campus. We noticed that there are a lot of barriers for UMN students to access the Disability Resource Center (DRC). For students struggling with learning or attention disabilities, it might be difficult for them to make the necessary appointments to get set up with the DRC. Using ideas from the SMART tutoring that is already offered on campus, we thought that it would be beneficial for students to receive individualized help from their fellow students. We devised a system to remove barriers to entry for students looking for peer help by making it easy to ask for a peer advocate. Our team made a prototype of what the DRC website could look like that would showcase peer advocate profiles and offer a low-stakes google form for students to fill out asking for help.

This is a map I made that shows all of the potential pitfalls and barriers a student with disabilities may encounter when seeking resource help. Our solution was to provide students with a peer advisor who had experience navigating disability diagnoses and resource applications. Peer advocates would vouch for students when seeking out resources or when letting professors know accommodation needs.

Aside from obvious disability barriers, we thought that the DRC website was very poorly designed. I created this mock-up of the websites redesign to show how it could be improved. I utilized design principles such as simplicity-- the original website had too many bulky blocks of text. I also used information about scanning patterns to address the hierarchy of information, putting the most necessary info at the top and easy to find.