The Project

BrainStation is a training organization providing courses on digital subjects such as UX Design, Web Development or Product Management.

The project was to imagine a new student portal through a design sprint.

My Role

In a team of 4 designers, I was in charge of the dashboard interface.

Tools

Sketch for wireframing

Research and Ideation

We started with evaluating the portal’s strengths and weaknesses.

The portal's strengths were:

• It was intuitive, therefore easy to use and find information needed

• All the course materials were available

• The daily agenda was appreciated

Its weaknesses were:

• The dropdown menu made it tedious to access a specific material

• To see the events, the students had to exit the portal and go back to the main website

• The student couldn't track their progress in the program or the challenges

• A resources section and a contact section were needed

• The students didn't know what the hamburger icon was for

Assessing the portal enabled us to make assumptions on opportunity areas:

• View upcoming events from the portal

• Track courses and challenges progress

• Submit work and receive feedback

• Access to resources instead of using an external tool (currently using Slack)

• Contact staff and other students

Next, we interviewed student to understand their needs and verify our assumptions. From the interviews, we created a user journey map to identify students pain points and confront them to our opportunity area assumptions.

Our assumptions being confirmed, we developed “How might we” questions to capture all the possible opportunities and prioritized them. Due to our 4 days time constraints, we decided to focus on:

• Creating an easy and pleasant portal experience

• Tracking courses and challenges progress

• Implementing a resources section

• Keeping the students updated on events and announcements   

Sketching

We started with online research for portal interface interactions then proceed to a sketching activity and a silent doting vote to determine the direction we would take for the redesign.

Finally, we created a storyboard using the voted sketches to visualize students journey using the new portal. Our portal redesigned included a new dashboard, a new course material section, a resources section and a challenges section.  

Prototyping

We divided the work and each of us worked on a specific feature. Since the dashboard I sketched received the most votes, I decided to take on that part.

For design consistency, we began with developing a wireframe template before each working on our own part. The template included the top and vertical navigation bar based on the BrainStation style guide.

User Testing

The focus of the last day was to assemble all of our work together and test it out on five students to identify usability issues. We uncovered:

For the dashboard:

• Despite relevant information, the cards were too big

• The calendar was missing the legend, therefore students couldn’t identify the different events

• The chat opening at the bottom of the page forced students to stop what they were doing to scroll down

For the course material sections:

• Students liked being able to easily see weekly topic with the progress bar at the top of the screen

• Students liked being able to take notes but the note section was preferred near the lesson rather below, allowing them to view everything at once

• Students liked seeing the agenda next to the course content

For the progress section:

• Students liked seeing all the challenges and keeping track of what they submitted

• Students liked comparing themselves to others with the leaderboard

• The names of the different challenges were missing

For the resource section:

• Students liked being able to have all the resources in one place

• Students were confused by the preview of categories

• The 'Contribute' card was too big in comparison of the other cards

Iterating

The challenge ended after the testing but I took on my own to improve my part based on the testing results. I changed the chat box layout and reduced its size; similarly, I reduced the cards sizes and added the most used sections. Finally redesigned the calendar and added a legend.

Lessons learned

What I learned from this project is that good team work requires to be open minded, to listen to the teammates ideas and chose designs based on the project's best interest instead of one designer's personal ego. Moreover, its important to express ones views and ensure that everyone is heard so it can be discussed.