University of Washington Students Platforms
Intro
University student platforms are overwhelming so lets fix that.
University of Washington (UW) students’ website is similar to most university-integrated websites out there; it contains an abundance of both data and functions. Because of that, the website tends to look busy, cluttered, and disorganized. UW has fallen victim to information overload on every screen and as a result has neglected the user experience of the website itself. .
The purpose for doing this project was to provide autonomy and confidence to students in utilizing their universitys’ student platform to its full potential by making the user flow more intuitive and hasslefree. With 6,000 newly enrolled students at UW every year and a few dozen staff to advise them, we also hope to ease the student’s dependence on University staffs for guidance for using the platform.
Design Process
Updated Double Diamond - Framework for innovation
For our two week sprint it was decided to implement the updated double diamond framework for this project. During the first week, I implemented basic concepts of the Research, Insight, Ideation, and Prototyping, test. The aim was to give the best result within a week, then keep iterating over the problem and solutions after user testing. to keep the process creative and non linear.
Week 1 Design Sprint
Day I - Lets dive into the problem we are trying to solve
I started off the project creating assumptions about the user problems for the project which we formed from our analysis of the UW platform. Communicating early on with the product owner benefited in narrowing our focus to the 4 key pages within the UW platform. Which are:
User Problems:
Confusing Navigation
Student have a really hard time navigating through the UW site, the resources are hard to find because of the lack of flow within the site.
Cognitive Load
the pages contain too much information and is hard to digest the information without increasing user stress levels
Confusing language
The site uses langauge that is hard for students to decipher and understand. The page titles are often labled in a confusing manner
How Might We
After understanding about the user problems and project scope, I moved on to form the problem statements. We conducted how might we as a team for each page and utilized card sorting come up with the most important How might we’s to focus on.
Week 1 Design Sprint
Day II - Research and Discovery
Somtimes reinventing the wheel is not necessary in getting ispirations for possible solutions. I thought it was highly important to understand the positioning for UW’s platform in the academic platform market by anayzing other University student platforms. At the same time I looked into other apps outside of the academic sphere for inspiration.
Week 1 Design Sprint
Day III - Sketching & Low-fidelity design
All the other academic insitutions we looked into had their own limitations, so I decided to pick and choose features that best suited us from the moodboard, and began sketching via Crazy 8’s method. We sketched soltuons that incorporated different features for each page into low fidelity wire frames.
Above : Low-fidelity wireframes
Week 1 Design Sprint
Day IV & V - Prototyping and Testing
Based on our lo-fi design, I moved on to hi-fi design. For this I used the current color pallate, logo specification and typography as I wanted to create a cohesive design.
The Moment of Truth
Lets Recap on our focus, I wanted to provide a simple organized platform for students to be able to easily navigate and use. So created different scenarious for the usability testers to complete for MyPlan, Account, Profile and resources. In order to eliminate test nerves and bias, users were informed that they not being tested. Some of the user questions that we asked were:
My Plan Scenario 1. How can you plan for graudation based on your current track ?
Finance Scenario 2. How do you make a partial payment for classes ?
Hi fidelity and Prototype
I made some scenarios with the prototypes so we can conduct usability testing the next day. These are the prototype for MyPlan page and Finance Page
Above : MyPlan of UW Prototype
Above : Finance Page of UW Prototype
Week 2 Design Sprint
Day I & II - Iterations and improvements
Turning painpoints into opportunities
Based on the feedback of the users, we braisntormed a series of solutions and improvements for each of the user flows. I made sure to create opportunities from user painpoints as listed below
Week 2 Design Sprint
Day III - User Testing part 2
After all the iterations were conducted again it was decided to retest our design, to see if we were successfully able to provide solutions to their stated painpoints. We recruited 5 additonal users and kept the same user scenarios. The results are listed below:
Week 2 Design Sprint
Day IV - The Last Call!
After assesing the user feedbacks we once again cleaned up our designs. We also made sure that our design guidelines were closely followed for the 4 different focuses to ensure consistency. The prototypes were tested to make sure all the elements functioned properly before handing off to the development team.
Did we achieve our project goal ?
At the start of the project our goal was to ease the student’s dependence on University staffs for guidance for using the platform.
In order to reach our goal, a degree requirement page was added which will provide students a clear guidance on which courses to take to be on track for graduation easing the need of a counselor. we also added an editable function to the class cards for MyPlan, allowing students to easily customize thier class plan for upcoming semesters. With the left expandable menu and searchable resources, I was able to provide a sense of clear hierchy and organization to the site.
Final Prototypes
MyPlan - Scenario 1
Above : My Plan Final Prototype
Above : Resources Final Prototype
Moving Foward
The Story Continues...
After solving the problems I faced with MyPlan, Fianance, I will continously try to improve the functionalities of the UW platform, as no design is ever perfect.
For our roadmap, my team is planning on working on: collaborating with counselors and professors inorder to create more value for not only the students but for the staff as well. We hope to work more on the Degree requirement page, as students had a bit of a stuggle with this page. We also hope to do a 3rd round of testing for the protoype.