Project:
Redesigning Northwest University Student Online Portal: Discovery
Summary:
This is the story of how my design team from my UX Advanced Lab redesigned our school’s student online portal, and how we got to see actually changes to the system.
Responsibilities:
UX Design
Project Background
This project started at the end of September 2023, which was a whole class project (there were 6 of us) that was centered on improving the new online portal that Northwest University has switched to that semester. We then split the project into 3 subgroups, all focusing on one specific page we would redesign. The three pages were the home page that displays all your courses and upcoming tasks, the calendar view, and then the page I worked on, the individual course page.
It was significantly different than the previous student portal Northwest used, and many students and teachers did not like the new system. Students spend most of their time on Discovery, it’s where students turn in their assignments, look at upcoming work, find resources that teachers have assigned, take online quizzes, and more. Because we spend so much time on it, we wanted to take the time to find out how to make it more usable and present that to our technology office to see if anything could be changed.
User Research
We took time as a group to review our page and talk about the issues we’ve faced. Then we went to our fellow students around campus and also asked them what they liked or disliked. We found students have a hard time finding where their assignments are, the home page is useless to all students, and the calendar isn’t customizable or lets you sort classes and projects how you want them to. Often students turn in assignments late because late assignments often disappear after the due date instead of reminding students they haven’t turned it in. These are just a handful of issues students were having, and we wanted to see how we could fix them.
Brand Inspiration and Competitive Analysis
To help further define and brainstorm our ideas, we all separately created an inspiration board and did our own competitive analysis on one brand.
For my competitive analysis, I looked at WIX. I picked this because I have used it before in high school, when I built a website for a project I had. I wanted something easy to use that wouldn’t take too much time. Back then I did not know UX Design Principles and but I still found it very easy, which is what I want our target user to feel when using the product we were conceptualizing.
Persona
We built out a persona, Becky a mom who is wanting to start up an at-home bakery, but has no understanding on how to start a business or how to sell online.
Sketches and Wireframe
For my sketches, I took inspiration from Chat GPT and its chat feature. I liked the idea that you could simply just chat with the AI, ask questions, or ask for ideas and it would go through your check list and help you mark everything off. This did make it into the final Figma prototype, but it looks a little different than my sketches.
We had 5 overall Wireframe revisions/versions including the 3 prototypes we worked on. It started with simple low-res wireframes, Each page we would write out exactly why the page is there and how it will be used. This helped us define the purpose of each page and helped us further advance our design.
Wireframe Version 1
Wireframe Version 2
Final Prototype
Our Final prototype was significantly simplified, as time constraints arose, but we also werre feeling quite burnt out. We had been working on this project for a long time, so we were ready for the next assignment.
Our main point was to show how using the AI chat feature for our website would change the brand colors, fonts, and anything to fit exactly what the user wants.
Outcomes and Learnings
This was my first time using Figma for interactive prototyping. I watched one of my teammates head on the interactive part of the prototype, and watching him do that gave me lots of inspiration for my next designs. I believe that there were some places where we cut corners to finish our project, but if I were to go back I would redo the slide that shows you the brand fonts, colors, and photography. I would make it more visually appealing as well as make it more understandable and usable.
This project pushed me even further to iterate, iterate, and iterate. Working on the same project for long periods of time, it can be hard to see a new perspective. This is why for my team, it was important we were receiving feedback from professors and other students. That is what helped us get a fresh perspective.
Thanks for Reading!