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UX Project- Web

STUDYHUB

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Project Overview

We designed to improve the existing student portal as part of a course on UX design for complex systems. We took two systems and created one while paying attention to the users' needs. The project included market research, user research, task analysis, and persona creation. Finally, building wireframes and prototyping

Company Goal & Mission

The Goal

Creating a convenient and understandable system that mediates between the student and the services of the educational institution.

The Task

Making information, tasks, and assignments easily accessible to the student.

System Goals

Main Objective

Integrate existing college systems so the students can perform actions and receive information in a fast and accessible way.
 

Secondary Objective

  • ​Improving the user satisfaction survey score.

  • Reducing unnecessary communication with technical support.

  • Increasing the percentage of system logins.

  • Reducing performing actions time.

  • Reducing user error percentage in the system.

Competitors Analysis

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Pros:

  • Simple and intuitive system navigation.

  • Accessible lecturers contact information.

  • Calendar with relevant and contextual information.

  • Accessible files per class and time

Cons:

  • Irrelevant info & actions located in key system location.

  • Irrelevant info & actions for different type of users (student/lecture).

  • Bad use of UI and layout

Product Added Value

Simplicity

Provide ease of use for the users, by the salience of main features, without confusion.

Efficiency

Lowering the number of support applications, and therefore it’s institute’s resources

Certainty

Provide certainty for the user's actions through a holistic and consistent experience throughout the system

Discover User Research Method

In the ‘Strategize’ phase in order to get inspire, explore and choose directions and opportunities, we committed the following qualitative and quantitative methods:

Users feedback:
Self reported, open-ended and close-ended information provided by a sample of users (students) through an online questionnaire.

Interviews:
A researcher conduct interviews with potential users (students and lecturers), to discuss in depth what the participant thinks about the topic in question

It's disappointing, you invest a lot of money in tuition and you accept a reasonable system to work with
I realized that this is the system and I need to accept it, there isn't any other option
I will be more patient next time, I don't know if there will be a change.

User Requirements

We found that users have 10 main needs, and we divided the needs into two subcategories: 

Information:

  • Dates of submission of works

  • Daily calendar

  • Test and exams dates

  • Messages from lecture

  • Test from previous years

Actions:

  • Works and exercises submission

  • Download & viewing presentations 

  • Ordering documents & certification 

  • Courses registration

  • Payment of tuotion

User Profile

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Task Analysis:

The questionnaire we built consists mainly of questions about two categories: Actions and information details, and in each category, there were 17 items.

For example, under the category "Actions" there is the item "Sending a message to a lecturer".

On each item, participants were asked to rate according to two categories: importance and frequency.

From 1 (very low importance) to 4 (very high importance),
and from 1 (very low frequency) to 4 (very high frequency).

From the results we received - we could see how many people (N) marked the score 1, 2, etc.

To get an exact result of which item is more important / more frequent, we compiled a formula with a wider scale of 200 (we took the number of participants N = 50 dual the scale of 4) so ​​that each result shows exactly the numerical value of the item.

The formula: [(N*value)+(N*value)+(N*value)+(N*value)] / max-value

Example item - My average score - Information item:

According to its frequency: 15 people marked 1, 17 people marked 2, 11 people marked 3 and 7 people marked 4.

According to the formula we composed: = [SUM (C21 * 4, E21 * 3, G21 * 2, I21 * 1)] / 200 = ((15 * 1) + (17 * 2) + (11 * 3) + (7 * 4)) /200 = 0.5 - Its the value of the average score frequency.

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The Workflow:

01-Action Workflow:

Downloading presentation for a specific course lesson:

02-Action Workflow:

Submission of assignments and exercises

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Wireframe & Prototype

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Dilemmas & Solutions:

Methodological Approaches and Research Dilemmas:

  1. The quantitative questionnaire we published to our participants contained plenty of specific information we wanted to gather, and that could have led to form abandonment. To prevent that, we decided that all questions about the user experience are to be scaled from 1 to 4 (instead of open ended questions) to in order to prevent burnouts.

  2. The scaling wasn’t accidental. We decided to analyze our finding through an even scale based on methodological research methods, due to the fact that odd scale can lead to ambiguous results when participants are filling the ‘middle’ answer. Put it simply, we allowed our participants to choose an answer that leans towards one end.

  3. On the qualitative research, when we started the competitor’s research so we can understand what student systems are on the market, we didn’t had enough knowledge about the system’s backend, and this gap led us to conduct a qualitative research with our campuses online support team, to discover and research ‘Moodle’ system, which led us to the finding that it is used by all of the universities in Israel.

Design and UCD Dilemmas:

  1. When we designed our final concepts, we had to decide how to present the courses that are taking place on the same day within the homepage screen. We thought maybe we could present different picture for each course to differentiate between them, but after some research we decided to apply the ‘Aesthetic and minimalist design’ heuristic and have each presented with its title and a unique color gradient.

  2. An issue that was brought forward at the peer review was high cognitive load - too much details. We wanted to reduce cognitive load when viewing the homepage, and therefore we allowed users to see which tasks, exams and other to-do’s they have by adding a small indication number at the title. this principle is based on ‘Visibility of System Status’ - the user knows at a moment glace what else he needs to accomplish, without being overwhelmed by information.

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