How to Design Potential Solutions for a Cross-Country Platform that Leverages Students’ Diversity: A User-Centered Design Approach – and its Challenges

This paper outlines a methodological perspective within the research question of how to design potential solutions for a cross-country platform that leverages students’ diversity to address their everyday challenges at the university level. Overall, students’ challenges can have different nuances based on academic, social, and psychological factors. This paper provides an applied approach into scenarios, personas, and blueprints. We used the double diamond design process model to design the multi-platform service. This paper will mainly focus on a case study from Mexico within its define and development stages, including suggestions for how to design potential solutions. Our study is based on interviews and workshops with 250 university students and 10 university staff members. Our findings reveal that the service blueprint work was an effective tool to provide an overarching view of the service and its components. The service blueprint allowed the design team to mentally zoom in and out during the design process and helped the larger team to generate new ideas and discuss current elements of the service being offered. However, the service blueprint is also time-consuming and demands significant structured coordination.