Student Handbook Website
Project Cause
Centennial college students were tired of shuffling through a physical paper handbook every year, some would even ask for online resources instead. The main goal of this project was to offer students a more eco-friendly and updatable option for handbook resources.
Roles & Team
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(Team of 4)
My roles were UX Designer, Researcher, and UI Design for the communications tab.
I worked the most with colleagues during the research and analysis phases.
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Timeframe & Deliverables
2 months-2020
Project charter
Personas
Sitemap
Medium Fidelity Prototype
Methods used
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User Surveys
User interviews
Content Audit
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UX Process
Research
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For this project's research, we conducted a content audit, remote one-on-one interviews, and a user survey. I spoke with students and past alumni, and my co-workers interviewed faculty and potential back-end users. Past experience with the handbook wasn't necessarily something we screened for when selecting participants.
These are the questions we asked student subjects;
Domestic or international?
We wanted to know whether students answering were studying in Canada or a different country. Would this have any effect on whether they used the handbook?
Where Do they look first?
Where do they go first for information about their course? We asked this so that we could analyses these other resources and spot why these resources were visited first.
Have they used it before?
This was to uncover how many students were actually familiar with the handbook. For those that had used the handbook, conversations were had about improvements.
Apps & sites they use most
This would lead to finding what potential users felt the most comfortable using. It also gave a sense of some of the features and shortcuts we knew that users would appreciate.
What Shortcut features do they use?
Asking users what shortcuts they're used to gave us a sense of their technical knowledge. We also were able to make conclusions about which shortcut features to leave out.
When Do they stop looking for info?
This question told us what turned users off during their experience. We wanted to know how to prolog their conversation with our new product and keep them engaged.
What other resources do they use?
We wanted to know what students were actually able to find with other school resources. We also wanted to avoid or re-telling information already provided to them.
What would they use it for?
Knowing how students would use the handbook supported whether we kept content reimagined it. We wanted to reorganize and minimize yet keep useful resources.
Design
-We built off the existing format of the handbook.
-We Reinvented the experience and kept the important content only
-Each of us came up with an interactive tab on the website, I was tasked with the Communication tab.
Prototype
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Welcome to the Communication tab! These are screens I designed and turned into a prototype.
Here students will find;
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-how to access other resource portals
-School communication services
-Other information provided online by peers.
Review
End-Result
I was super proud of how well our designs flowed together in this project. We all used our own preferred prototyping tools like Figma and Adobe XD, then we sewed them together with Invision.
I learned the fundamentals of working in a UX team and was able to work with some really talented designers.
What I learned
During this project, my team and I learned the importance of each design step as well as the final testing stage.
If I would do anything differently for this project, I most likely would go back and re-do our research survey questions. Most were answered as yes or no questions without an opportunity to learn from users and keep a watch for feedback.
Challenges
Our biggest challenge was not knowing if what we designed was actually going to be useful to everyday students. We would have really benefitted by doing extra user testing at the end of our process.
We also conducted more quantitative data than qualitative, which gave us close-ended and minimal data.