Designing for Belonging

Listening Before Designing

Before sketching anything, my partner and I focused on understanding what "belonging" actually meant for Black students at Purdue. Through interviews, conversational probes, and affinity mapping, we uncovered a few consistent themes:

• Students wanted better visibility into events and student organizations that aligned with their identity, interests, or goals.
• Community moments were often heard about after they happened.
• Incoming freshmen felt especially lost and didn't know where to begin.

With these insights, our job became less about designing something and more about making sense of a social system that already existed.

This led to our core insight: Belonging grows when information becomes accessible, communities feel reachable, and people can see themselves reflected in their environment.

Turning Insights Into Direction

Once we grounded the problem, we explored what form our digital tool should take, and what features would be most useful. We experimented with:

• Website versus mobile app concepts
• Different ways of categorizing events and organizations
• Onboarding flows tailored to students' different needs
• Levels of personalization that felt helpful, not invasive
• Visual identity approaches that felt welcoming and community-driven

A few design priorities emerged:

• Ease of discovery — events, orgs, and resources needed to be visible
• Self-definition — the platform had to adapt to students' interests
• Representation — it should feel like something created for the community, by the community

We translated these considerations into early wireframes and brought them back to participants for feedback, refining the direction in response.