Anchor 1

UP

Phase 1

/ Phase 2

Project context

My role

Project duration

Mentor

This was a UX/UI focussed project forming part of the final year of my Information design degree.

This was a solo project therefore I am responsible for all the processes and deliverables including UX research, user personas, user interviews, flow diagrams, wireframing and prototyping as well as designs.

3 weeks

Nicola Lotter

About the project

Problem Statement

The University of Pretoria’s (UP) is in a process of transformation; they want their institute to embrace forward thinking values that will prepare their students for the changing socio-political landscape. Therefore the website needs to be redesigned to represent the University's new ethos. Additionally the current UP website is extremely difficult to navigate and they want to make it more accessible for users.

My chosen user journey

Choosing what to study is a daunting task, but poorly designed user interfaces and user journeys make it increasingly more difficult to make an informed decision. Thus, I hypothesise if the information is filtered correctly and presented concisely students can be aided in the process of choosing a degree, and not hindered.

Therefore the user journey I choose is accessing course information, renamed What to Study. If you were wondering why I felt passionately enough to spend 3 weeks of my life on this? Because I knew this was a real need. My brother was busy applying for University and he got lost in the all the programmes that were available.

Objectives

1.

Improve 1 user journey (finding course information)

2.

Redesign the UP homepage

3.

Rebrand the UP website

Understanding

With my project it was a delicate balance between helping prospective students find degree/course information, but not alienating or dismissing other users which might have valuable insights. Therefore my initial research was broad, but became specific as the project progressed. The first stage I spent understanding the problem.

1. Find a user journey

When I started this project I already had a user journey in mind, finding course information. Therefore, I spent my time understanding the current UP homepage and finding course information user journey.

Information architecture

Remapping UP's homepage

User journey information mapping

I mapped the journey a prospective student would take to identify possible pain points and positives experiences.

Key findings

The homepage is difficult to navigate and struggled to find course/degree information.

Interviews

During the interview parts of my project, I interviewed 10 people throughout the project. Firstly I tested the existing Yearbook functionality (this was UPs name for degree/course information).Secondly, I gathered insight into the user journey for prospective students, parents and current students. Thus gaining a better understanding of the users motivations and frustrations. Furthermore, I constantly re-interviewed my users and reiterated their feedback into my designs.

Interview objectives

Identify my users and their technology literacy levels
Evaluate how users navigate the current website.
Recognise pain points.
Identify working elements.
Understand what users want from the degree/course information.
Observe how users find degree information.
Understand how users filter information

2. Initial interviews

Understanding the current homepage, website shortcomings, and testing hypotheses of prospective & current students wanting better degree/course information.

Interview notes

Key findings

Users do not use search function.
Website is confusing.

3. Creating personas

The main users I identified for the website is prospective students, current students, parents or guardians. My first priority persona will be prospective students since they are the main users of the What to study functionality.

First priority persona

Second priority persona

Third priority persona

I included this persona to compensate for users that have a lower technological literacy level.

Prototyping

In this phase I tested many different versions of my project, thus improving my project with each iteration.

4. Creating low fidelity paper prototypes

Understanding the wants, needs & frustrations of my user.

UX Research

For this project I did a UX research paper, thus taking UX best practises and contextualising it with my user interviews, user journeys, wire-framing and paper prototyping. The paper also includes my competitor analysis.