Research
In our initial workshops, we heard from a very diverse and opinionated group of 30+ stakeholders in a classroom. It was a privilege to see our UX Practice Manager calmly and swiftly talk through and notate on the whiteboard a tidal wave of information - topics, subtopics, complaints, suggestions — the passion of the crowd was evident. During these workshops, I collected questions from the audience, started organizing the tidal wave, and discussed what we saw with our business analyst.
Early Themes. Starting to map the student experience and some of the themes from our initial workshops.
Our next step was to talk directly to our users and map their experience. We conducted 30 user interviews between the two of us, with students from a representative range of ages and backgrounds, paying attention to perceptions, pain points, and opportunities. For some of the interviews we split the duties and one of us asked questions while the other one took notes, and for some interviews we both asked questions and took notes ourselves.
The interviews helped us gain a full understanding of the application, enrollment, and class selection processes. Analysis on the interviews resulted in a 'highlights' document, shown in part below. We used the highlights document to help us with user journey mapping, feature list prioritization, and wireframe development.
Highlight Document. We constructed this document to distill the most meaningful moments from the interviews.
Detailed Journey Map. This is the same journey map, but expanded and refined to help our stakeholder groups understand what we were defining as the 'MVP experience'. Eventually, this map was duplicated and edited to become the 'future state' journey map that I discuss below.
Ideation & Conceptualization
This was where the magic happened.
By building our perspective to the point of being able to see the whole journey clearly, we could start to innovate on the existing student application experience.
Through the process of iterating on the journey map, discussing the priority list with our design team, and gaining clarity on the opportunities presented by combining many systems into one single database, we optimized for a cohesive digital experience — identified trips that could be combined, data that could be auto-filled, and revised the order of key moments in the enrollment process.
Building on our current-state journey map, I created a future-state journey map, which, although not pictured due to confidentiality, was a critically important document. Styled similarly to a service map with multiple swim lanes of interactions, this future-state journey map helped us to identify and understand the key moments in the journey that we wanted to optimize for. From this future-state journey map and all of the research we had done at that point, I derived a list of features, prioritized them, and that enabled me to start mapping the experience out on a page by creating wireframes.
Wireframes: These key screens represent the dynamic contextual home page, surfacing the most important tasks to the front page for students to have an easier, less disjointed enrollment experience.
A key innovation that I identified at this point was the app's structure. Through exploratory wireframes, I broke each step down into an interactive checklist and designed the app so that the current task list would surface up to the 'top level' of the app's home page: a dynamic contextual home page design. Instead of needing to independently keep track of what task is up next, users could simply visit their home page and their current checklist would be right at the top of the page.
Instead of needing to independently keep track of what task is up next, users could simply visit their home page and their current checklist would be right at the top of the page.
In order to test the structure even before visual design was applied, I created a clickable prototype with these wireframes, and again together with the business analyst, we performed usability testing with 10 users to make sure it would support the needs we had outlined. We received a large amount of actionable and detailed feedback, ranging from having overlooked certain features like a job board, to not understanding certain naming conventions that we were proposing. However, in general, we received reactions of relief and delight from these usability tests, with students commenting 'This would have saved me hours and hours' and 'You only have to look here? Thank heavens, I have lost my passwords so many times'.
