Connecting all the resources available at the School of Information to increase the availability of needed information and engage the students.
Wireframing, Storyboard, Prototyping, Personas, Sketching, Competitive Analysis.
A mobile platform for the students that provides information related to the UMSI and enhances interaction between the students.
Sep 2017 – Dec 2017 (4 months)
Being able to find the right information and engaging with right content and activities would lead the student to academic success. Enormous unorganized and disconnected information ends students in confusion. The design intervention aims to respond to this issue by shaping an application that allows students of UMSI keep engaging with the content and give insights into decision making with minimum efforts.
I explored through the existing alternative solutions that are either available or being used by the students to find required information or to interact with each other. With various parameters pros, and cons are analyzed comparing with each other. The analysis helped me to find the shortcomings of the available solutions.
To understand the user needs I conducted six user interviews of both graduate and undergraduate students in the University of Michigan School of Information. Most of the incoming students shared that they had a bad experience while choosing the courses as they don’t know much information about the curriculum and the professors. All the decisions made by them we either random or through the limited information available on the school’s website. Current students expressed that, they are not able to keep an update on the current information trends happening around.
From the user surveys another problem got uncovered, which was that the students were not able to interact with each other, as they feel that to advance in the information field, interaction with multiple students will open new ideas that lead to better innovations.
Brainstorming allowed me to explore the potential solutions that could tackle the problem. After developing sketches of the brainstormed solutions, the sketches helped me in verifying my ideas with the end user.
Brainstorming allowed me to explore the potential solutions that could tackle the problem. After developing sketches of the brainstormed solutions, the illustrations helped me in verifying my ideas with the end user.
After understanding the users and their requirements, I developed 4 personas to analyse the multiple user needs.
Understanding the user problems and requirements I have defined my goal and shaped features that could satisfy the goal.
Every feature can have multiple possibilities of execution, to decide on a perfect approach I used QOC (Questions, Options, and Criteria) analysis. Features such as log-In options for incoming students and processing screen while opening the application were analyzed using QOC analysis.
Wire-frames were developed to understand the application flow and the arrangement of elements. Below are some of the wire-frames developed, to view more click here.
After understanding the task flow and user workflow, I developed a prototype with paper to understand the structure of the application. I used these prototypes for usability testing that gave insights on improving the task flow and usability issues.
After multiple iterations of design and testing, I shaped a high fidelity prototype. Take a look at the prototype below.