Redesigning Blackboard

I decided to redesign my university’s student portal

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BEFORE

AFTER

First I decide to find out what people thought was missing in the current system. To do this, I did a mixture of observational studies where observed some people use the system and interviews, where I asked them about the features they use, Here’s what I learned:

People experienced a great deal of frustration going from tab to tab to find stuff.

I hypothesized that this was because of three things:

There was too much information on one screen and not all of it was relevant to students
The tab names were ambiguous at times which caused a mismatch of expectations and reality
The UI was generally very cluttered

card sorting

To figure out how best to organize information, I conducted a card sorting exercise where I gave students flashcards with all the features of the system written on them and asked them to sort them into categories and label the categories. Then I used the commonly used categories to reorganize the info in my prototype.

before

after

changing up the UI

Next I worked to clean up the UI to ensure that only the relevant information (based on the card sorting exercise) was available on each screen

For some features that usually take you to a different webpage, I made the UI look like it was integrated. For example with the degree audit and course planning option

final invision prototype

feel free to click around and interact with my prototype!