The LYSTI project Spring 2021 

The LYSTI (Trust in Yourself and Your Employment) project had its first pilot this Spring 2021. The interdisciplinary project team consisted of four students: an IT engineering student, a business administration student, an exchange student from the Czech Republic, and a business information systems student. The team worked together to find the best ways to connect with other students from different fields, and how to market internships for them. 

Meeting at Linnanmaa campus

The team worked mostly remotely but occasional meetings at campus were also arranged. Roles were divided between the team members, and they got to choose the platforms they wanted to use together. The team ended up using Microsoft Teams as their “office”, and Trello and Mural for project managing. “We found it exciting to have so much freedom with the tools that we wanted to use”, the team members say. 

The team started out the process by planning and doing research. They thought about ways to interview people and contact the right target group. When those target groups were identified, interviews took place. The team members conducted some interviews with students all over Finland and it turned out to be a very useful way to get valuable information about the target group. The team members had no previous experience in interviewing, but with tips and help from the coaches, they were able to have successful interviews. 

After conducting the interviews and analyzing the results using service design tools, it was time to move onto prototyping. The team had found the channels that would be the most suitable for marketing for students, and the prototyping could begin. The team made posters, advertisements for Oiva, and a mockup for an Android app. The team also made responsive front end of web application in React.

Lastly, the prototypes were tested and improved. Two members of the team set up a voting spot for the posters at the Linnanmaa campus. The posters were hung up and numbered, and other students could vote for their favorite poster with a closed voting. The team also asked for opinions, thoughts, and improvement ideas from the students, and quickly noticed that conversational feedback was easier to give than written feedback. The posters sparked up some interesting conversations and the team was happy with the amount of engagement from the students.  

Poster voting spot at Linnanmaa campus

Posters

Overall, the team found this project interesting and fun. Despite the challenges of working remotely with different schedules, the team is happy with the results. The whole project was a learning process, and everyone in the team acquired many new skills, such as solving problems in an agile way and working with new tools. They also got to brush up their skills in project management and development. The team wants to emphasize the importance of communication in team projects and encourage everyone to join interdisciplinary teams if the opportunity arises. 

Written by:
Emma Ylipoussu 

Assisted by
Jonas Aho (LIK2SNO)
Shyam Bhetuwal (DIN17SP) 

Notes:

Jonas: “I agree with my teammate on the overall situation. as well as the outcome. A fair warning is to be given though. Freedom to do what you wish may sound enticing, but it just might be harder than it seems. “ 

Shyam: ”I agree with my teammates about the learning outcomes. Being a student of web development as my main part of studies, I researched various methodology about developing the better UI of the application and discussed with teammates. I decided to develop the front end of the project application page in React. Some mock-up designs of Android application were done by other teammates. A responsive UI for the project application page was made in React, which can be developed further for real use. We tried getting feedback from some people for the development too. Most of the functionalities are working in the UI but lack of enough professional skills and time, we were not able to develop a fully functional full stack web application. However, I got nice feedback from some of my friends about the responsive front end web application “.