University of Washington
Helping new students ease the registration process & better find university resources.
This project was later expanded upon to incorporate the student hub & resources page. An addition week sprint was need to implement the ideas.
Timeline: 2 week
Process: Triple Diamond, Design Sprint
My Role: UX Designer
Teammates: 9 UX Designers & 1 Project Manager
Tools: Figma, Zeplin & Zoom
Setting goals for professional growth
I graduated at the start of covid-19, when teachers were scrambling to convert in-class content into their online counterpart. Sadly, my department’s capstone project didn’t survive the ordeal and the class lost the highlight of their portfolios.
How could I get a job with no work to show for? I asked myself. I changed my perspective and sought to see this as an opportunity to challenge myself.
I focused on networking with design mentors on ADPList, listening to professionals from other disciplines on Linkedin and engaged in design communities on Discord. Fortunately, I was able to find an opportunity to grow with a design mentor from Expedia. With this apprrenticeship under my belt, I was able to set goals for myself:
• Learn how I fit as a teammate & how I work with others
• Practice hard UX skills (Figma & Zeplin)
• Understand how UX fits in a sprint format
• Learn how to conduct UX research
Improving class registration @ University of Washington
I worked with a team on improving the class registration process for the University of Washington and when 5 out of 6 teammates couldn’t figure out how to register one class (The 6th person went to school at UW) we knew in-coming freshman were bound to be confused. There were a few things the team noticed while going through the process:
👉 Scattered Information
Needed information were on different platforms. Students had to find the SNL number of their classes on another page to type into the registration system.
👉 Unclear Call to Action
The steps to achieve registration were not intuitive. What made this harder was the lack of clarity in how to complete the steps and where to get the information.
👉 Unfamiliar terms
Students were unfamiliar with some terminology, making it harder for students to know if certain items were of any importance for registering.
👉 Complicated Navigation
Returning students struggled to remember where to navigate during registration time. There are also several ways students can register.
Understanding the users
The team mapped out the steps to the original registration flow and looked at other universities to see if they may have tackled similar problems. We took heavy inspiration from James Madison University and California Institute of the Arts (universities a couple of us went to), interviewing several users currently using these systems.
We learned a few key insights from students at James Madison & CalArts:
• Their registration flow mimicked systems they’ve used before (cart & shopping system)
• Users had access to an online planner which can track major, minor and general studies requirements
Determining scope constraints & audience
Although the majority loved the idea of incorporating a student planner, we had to narrow down our scope to prioritize the necessary actions to register a class. With the limited amount of time & having back to back communication with the product owners & developers, we had to assume and hypothesize that users had some knowledge on what classes to take and their major/minor/general education requirements & prerequisites.
Here is what the team concluded on what we should focus on & who our audience was:
• Target audience were new university students between the ages 18 - 21. Admins would be next sprint.
• Focused on adding, dropping, swapping classes & changing grading options (pass/fail or letter grade).
Visualizing user flow & interface
To gather UI examples, I looked at other universities to see how they may have solved similar issues University of Washington was having. From the interviews prior, we learned that users from other universities thought their registration system was similar to other systems they have used. This gave me the idea to look outside of our university examples like Amazon & Etsy.
The original user flow we made gave us a bird’s eye view as to what areas were having problems and where we could optimize. By visiting problem areas of the flow, we could see where certain ideas could work and what wouldn't make the cut.
Design Process
Our aim for this sprint was to create an intuitive registration process for the students, increase the speed of class approvals, submissions & swaps and to improve retention in the college registration process. In order to achieve those goals, we simplified the number of steps & language used. Using the updated user flow as reference, we created concepts on its appearance ending with the high fidelity results below.
I helped finalize the "dropping a class" flow and created auto-layout variations for the table.
Testing first iteration
We conducted our first usability testing on our first iteration with 6 users and an average 67% success rate per task. The team extended the sprint for another week to make more iterations for better results.
Testing results & changes made
There were a few areas we wanted to improve on for the second week which we did not address in the first iteration.
Tab header was not distinct enough and was being completely overlooked by users: We removed the tab header altogether and redesigned it into clear and simplified CTA buttons on the right side. This led to problems with the users completing their tasks.
“Update Schedule” link with its color and underline was highly distracting for users: We simply removed the “Update Schedule” button completely along with the “Display Schedule” and “Display Textbooks” buttons since these features were not necessary and over complicating the users task.
“Selecting the Campus” was obscure causing users to skip over the requirement before searching: To draw more attention to the “Select the Campus” function it was placed above the search function and required to be inputted before continuing on to searching for a class.
Users were not paying much attention to the department filter because they were focused on searching for a class and distracted from this function: The left hand department menu was removed and consolidated with the filtering functions in the center section to providing more clarity in the design through whitespace.
Users were having a hard time finding the “Enroll” button: Rather than scrolling down past the calendar to find the “Enroll” button, both the List View and Calendar View were consolidated into a toggle button allowing the “Enroll” button to be moved up into the screen view.
Ellipses icon was not intuitive for most users to click and edit classes through: This caused confusion and frustration for users trying to edit their classes. The ellipses icon was changed to two separate more intuitive icons for users to edit and remove classes.
Final Iteration
Testing final iteration
In this testing, we had a combination of older & perfect users. All of them could use the new UW registration system without any or extensive help.
"This system is easier than what my university uses. I don't have to look up those darn SLN codes for my classes anymore."
5/5 users were able to register their classes successfully.
4/5 users admitted they preferred this system.
Reflecting: What I got out of the project?
I came into this sprint doubting the skills I've developed in college. Imposter syndrome played a huge role in challenging myself for better or worse. And I acknowledge I carried this feeling since my years at university. Though, I pushed myself to take action and fail often so I can better understand how UX works in the industry. The personal goals I set for myself in the beginning were skills I was able to develop thanks to mentorship.
•I came out feeling more confident in my thought process.
•I learned more about UX research, how UX fits in sprints, how to use Figma & Zeplin, and how to better communicate.
•I learned that mentorship is a method of learning I enjoy.
