MYCOURSES

In what ways can myCourses make a student better?

Through my redesign, I try answering this question with an attempt to create a design solution that would facilitate the overall growth and development of a student.

Overview

About: MyCourses is the course management system that allows instructors and? students to interact and access course materials online. As a student at RIT, myCourses plays an important role in shaping student-course engagement and is used as a primary tool to assess progress, view deadlines, take tests, receive grades/ feedback, and submitting work to list a few functions. Students are mostly dependent on myCourses heavily for at least one of the functions listed above.

Task: The existing myCourses website was recently redesigned in the summer of 2017. My task was to address the issues the redesign did not, and come up with my own design solution of what myCourses can and could have been. Going into this project, I wanted to explore the untapped potential an application like this had and it’s ability to help students be more efficient, productive and engaged. The ways in which it could potentially help a student truly kept me inspired in my process. In order to build a successful user-centric?design solution, I had to truly observe and learn from what students across the university felt about myCourses.

Approach: I started by conducting a 3 part user research with around 50 participating students consisting of interviews, surveys and recording students navigate the existing myCourses and documenting their experience. In the first part of my research, I asked questions that mostly related to the existing in-app experience and identified pain points within the current user experience of the redesigned myCourses. The second phase of surveys was developed based on the responses I had collected and asked broader questions about ways in which the web app could help a student. The third phase I proposed ideas based on responses and checked for what appealed to the students and what didn’t before I set forth the goals and identified problems I wanted to focus on solving with my redesign.

Research results

Redundant / Ineffective features

Results show that users tend to primarily use 3 out of 8 main features available. This data proves some features in the app to be ineffective and unnecessary and a much more focused and streamlined approach is needed.

Task tracking troubles

Around 80% users claimed to have missed a deadline at least once due to myCourses not effectively giving users a clear indication of due tasks and deliverables. The web app currently lacks a simple and efficient way for users to track and monitor their tasks and this creates a major problem for most users.

Project goals

Clarity and Communication is key to success

Most students expressed difficulties with being clear on deadlines, expectations, and deliverables. I wanted to focus on creating a simple and effective design solution that eliminates this problem and gives users access to information efficiently and helps them stay on top of things. I wanted to improve communication with the professors and help build better professor-student relationships.

A new visual personality

Create a welcoming and friendly visual design solution to help make students feel more comfortable using the app.

Design solutions

Let’s find what you’re looking for

An extremely content dense app, documenting years of course information and activity. This makes the current myCourses very difficult and intimidating to navigate and find information fast. This made me focus on building a smart and powerful tag-based search interaction to help students access information with ease.

A successful student is a healthy student

I introduced a new ‘call in sick’ action which allows students to notify professors when they fall ill or cannot make it to class due to a valid reason. I wanted the interaction to be as simple and intuitive as possible keeping in mind the user would be a sick student. As medical issues are often recurring, myCourses lets you autofill your message to the professor through prompts generated based on the user’s sick leave request history.

A smarter task planner you deserve

I introduced a dedicated task planner section to address this problem. This accommodates the ‘grab n go’ style use of the web app where students are given quick and relevant information about their tasks. The advantage of having a dedicated task planner is that it keeps a well-organized record of all the tasks assigned and allows users to go back to access those tasks.

I studied the design systems of a few productivity and task management apps while creating my solution. I decided to use smart task cards to keep things simple and efficient inspired by post-it notes. These cards would provide the user with quick information and reminders and would make use of progressive disclosure to add a second layer of information about the specific task.

Final prototype

Key takeaways