DESIGNING A SEAMLESS ONLINE STUDENT EXPEREINCE

At the University of Colorado Boulder the online experience is fragmented for its students. Imperative tasks such as registering for classes or paying tuition were too difficult to complete. I worked with a team to understand and improve the online student experience.

THE CHALLENGE:

At the University of Colorado Boulder, students rely on many different online platforms to complete an array of tasks from registering for classes to paying their tuition.

Unfortunately, the student experience online is fragmented. Students not only have trouble completing tasks, they also do not know who to contact for assistance. To improve their experience we conducted extensive research to identify pain points while also providing recommendations on how to improve the online student experience.

OBJECTIVES:

Identify what makes the online student experience fragmented
Consolidate the all different resources students utilize into a one-stop-shop

MY ROLE:

Design surveys and interview questions
Recruit Participants
Conduct interviews
Assist in the organization and structure of focus groups
Analyze survey and interview responses
Transcribe interviews and focus groups

Though the goals of this project is to understand and improve the general online experience we spent a lot of time understanding “myCUinfo,” which is the student portal at the University of Colorado Boulder. Students use “myCUinfo” for a variety of tasks, this project was focused on understanding the following tasks:

Registering for Classes
Managing Notifications
Viewing Class Schedules

Viewing and Paying Financial Accounts
Viewing the Semester Booklist
Contacting their Academic Advisor

APPROACH:

In order to fully understand the online student experience we collected various data regarding the student experience (in general) and specifically about their experience online. With all of the data we collected we created a data gallery and invited representatives from different branches of the university that impact the student experience to help us interpret the data.

Pain Point Questionnaire: We created and delivered a brief questionnaire to uncover the most pressing pain points in the online student experience. I would walk around campus with an iPad and ask students to fill out the survey

Student-Design Portal Mockup: We had students in an advertising class design mock-ups of a new student portal

Social Media Probing: We looked through social media posts from May 2015- August 2017 to find pain points student may have expressed on: Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit

Past Data: We obtained past data from:

A survey on "myCUinfo" (the student portal at the university)
Data from the Bursar's office regarding tuition and billing related tasks
The university's IT Service Center log data
Post-registration survey data from new students

Student Portals at Peer Institutions: We explored student portals at peer institutions to see how they design and organize their student portals

Student Interviews: We conducted in-depth one-on-one interviews with current and incoming students to grasp what exactly their pain points are

Student Focus Groups: We held 3 focus groups with representative samples of the university to map out pain points of the student experience and how they would rate each pain point in terms of: frustration, familiarity, ease of use, frequency, and duration

Advisor Insights: We had several conversations with a variety of different academic advisors from the school of Arts & Science

Staff Insights: We had several conversations with staff members from a variety of different departments at the university:

Admissions
Financial Aid
Registrar
Housing and Dining
BuffOneCard office
New Student and Family Program
Office of Information Technology

FINDINGS:

With all of the work we did we developed a set of design principles to guide the design of a seamless online student experience at the University of Colorado Boulder:

Accessible and Secure

Design a seamless experience that is comparably accessible to all students, including students with disabilities
Protecting student data and other confidential information

Whole and Connective

Providing students with a comprehensive single point of entry
Designing an accompanying face-to-face or virtual experience to connect students to the resources they need when they need them

Personal and Adaptive

Personalizing content and providing students control over the information they see
Designing an adaptive experience that provides students with the right information at the right time

Intuitive and Easy-to-Use

Designing an easy-to-learn interface with functions that are easily understood or easily predicted by students
Allowing students to accomplish tasks easily with reduced frustrations

Reliable and Efficient

Providing students with a robust technology infrastructure that does not fail them when they need it the most
Allowing students to get their tasks done in the most efficient ways. This includes leveraging mobile and search and integrating all student data with all systems

Beautiful and Simple

Leveraging beautiful and aesthetically pleasing interfacing to design a delightful and pleasant online experience
Designing for simplicity, allowing students to accomplish tasks in the least amount of steps possible

Visual representation of student online experience

This image represents the fragmentation of the student experience; it demonstrates how students need to navigate between different online tools to complete administrative and academic tasks.

WHAT I LEARNED:

I learned a lot working on this project. It’s a personal favorite of mine because it exposed me to the world of UX. After working on this project I realized that I have been “doing” UX in my classes and when solving personal problems my whole life. Though I learned a lot, one of the main skills I learned was to make notes of the experience our users have that they aren’t explicitly saying. Throughout the project, students and staff often find ways to work around their pain points instead of reporting their pain points.

For example, myCUinfo, the student portal for the university, can’t be bookmarked on Safari because that overrides the security system. This was a pain point we didn’t know existed until we asked students to show us how they get to myCUinfo. We noticed a pattern where students would have several bookmarks on their personal computers but would google “mycuinfo cu boulder” to access mycuinfo. Eventually we asked the students why myCUinfo isn’t bookmarked, and this is how we learned about the pain point regarding actually accessing the portal.

I also learned that students aren’t aware of all the resources the university offers. This discovery came about when we asked students why they choose to google questions rather than utilizing the campus resources and the two answers we heard was:

Google is faster and more accessible
“What resources?”

Shortly after this project was over I worked with Academic Futures, a department of the university, to minimize the gap between administration and the students.