AthenAI

The personalized AI college application assistant. Made for FGLI students.

Timeline: April 2023, 4 hours


Team: Emily Gao, Emily Zhu, Akriti Poudel, Luca Snoey



Overview


AthenAI is the winning design for Sparkathon 2023, a human-centered-design designathon hosted by The Hive in Claremont. As the largest student case competition of the 5 Claremont Colleges, Sparkathon attracts students from all across California. Competitors are given 4 hours to design an innovative solution using the HCD process.

This year, the prompt was “How can we use generative AI to revolutionize education?”

Above is our slide deck pitch that won 1st place (and $1000!) among 100+ participants.


Further Exploration


  1. User testing with FGLI college applicants. Due to the constraints of the designathon, we were only able to conduct brief user testing. With the perspective of FLGI students, we would be able to validate designs with the true users of the product.

  2. Branding and UI iteration. Having a recognizable brand and iterating upon the interface of the screens for AthenAI would improve its ease of use.


Further Exploration


  1. User testing with FGLI college applicants. Due to the constraints of the designathon, we were only able to conduct brief user testing. With the perspective of FLGI students, we would be able to validate designs with the true users of the product.

  2. Branding and UI iteration. Having a recognizable brand and iterating upon the interface of the screens for AthenAI would improve its ease of use.



Further Exploration


  1. User testing with FGLI college applicants.

  2. Branding and UI iteration. Having a recognizable brand and iterating upon the interface of the screens for AthenAI would improve its ease of use.


Takeaways


  1. The importance of the problem statement. Since our prompt had so much potential, it was tough to narrow down our problem statement. Ultimately, agreeing on an empathetic and specific problem statement allowed the team to remain on the same page, working towards solving the same problem.

  2. The impact of user empathy. I was surprised at the effectiveness of such brief yet specific user interviews, and allowed us to center our problem-solving on the FLGI experience.