Competitive Analysis

I studied dozens of peer higher-education institutions for insights and ideas. It was a fun and revealing process to see how other universities and colleges approached student portal design. The following list are the institutions with notable qualities that provided me with inspiration:

• University of California, Berkeley: clean, intuitive design, useful without being overbearing

• University of Montana: well branded, organized, clean

• Cornell University: task oriented organization

• Wilfrid Laurier University: scalable design, personalized by affiliation

Important things to note from Competitive Analysis: 

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  Mobile Friendly: scalable design to work on smartphones
  

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  Personalization: tailoring the experience is important - get the right content, at the right time, to the student so they don't hate the experience
  

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  Customization: allow for all scenarios - schedules can change quickly
  

Ideation Phase

User Personas

College and Grad Students - age 18+ - Based on user interviews college students are the most important user group to focus on and according to previous research, first year students are usually the most unorganized and have difficulty maintaining a calendar during their transition from high school to college workloads.

Sketches

Paper Prototyping

Starting the ideation process I began sketching as to help me create a basic experience someone would go through while using this app. ​ Here are some of the rough wireframes that I sketched on paper first to iterate some ideas in the process of turning them into visual designs.

Implementation Phase

User Task Flow & Wireframing

This step of the design process is all about creating a user experience flow with all the content that is important ​for the app's user focused functionality - creating a site map is key element of this process. ​A site map will develop a connection between all contents of the app. It is basically how the user will be guided. After running some iterations I was able to generate a user flow that is simple and compliant for the user.

Mockups Phase

Visual Design & Key Features

The next step after figuring out the user flow and content display of the app is designing the visuals of the 'blueprint' that was created with the help of the wire-framing process. Important aspect of the visual design include selection of the colour scheme, font style, text display, selection of icons, and buttons that help with navigation throughout the app.

One key component to these screens is the user of colours - the main colour theme is sticking with Humber's brand of using blue and yellow so that it not only works well with the branding but also to ensure that students find it familiar. Other colours, specifically used in the calendar can help student with organization methods and will help them differentiate and move between classes and their course materials.

Other organizational features can be seen with the use of a slider where students can easily view important details, keep track of their deadlines, tasks and their progress with each individual assignment.

Users can easily navigation through the date slider at the top of the pages to quickly and effectively review past calendars and then user that some toggle slider to switch to their future tasks without having to waste time going to different pages. The bottom navigation is also a handy tool for students to switch between viewing their daily, weekly, or monthly calendars.

All classroom or teacher information is readily available on each page so that students do not get lost in trying to access the information on things such as finding their classroom, contacting their teachers, etc.

As mentioned earlier, customization is an important factor to this app. That is why I added an 'add' button to the middle of the navigation bar so students can instantly add an essential task to their calendars. On this screen students are able to set notification alerts where they can send a reminder to themselves to either start an assignment or prompt a specific date.

Reflection Phase

This project in general was a great learning experience for me as a designer. It helped me look into the depth of designing processes and gave me the opportunity to work on something that could benefit not only other students but was something that also would benefit me as a Humber student.

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