Case Study: Advise Student Portal, Ellucian

The Problem 

Students need to meet with their advisors for a variety of reasons, but setting up an appointment can be a challenge. They need to easily see who their advisors are and be able to schedule an appointment from their mobile device. 

The Solution

Design a mobile experience that allows students and advisors to connect without any roadblocks. 

My Role

• Market Research 

• User Interviews 

• Wireframe Sketches

• Clickable Prototypes

• User testing

• High fidelity mock-ups

• Specs and Handoff to Dev

Our first step was conducting interviews with many students to understand their preferred methods of communication and schedule management. We also asked about their college experience as a whole to fully understand the big picture and where this product would fit into it. 

What we discovered:

• There are a lot of tasks involved in being a student outside of schoolwork that can feel like a big hurdle to success.

• Current products offered by schools are clunky and often don't make things any easier.

• Most people prefer to plan and schedule appointments online rather than making a phone call. 

• It is important to students that they can control notifications so they don't miss the important stuff.

Point of View

Based on our findings we began to write out user stories. We made sure to "future-proof" and include additional features that could make the product more substantial, but may not be feasible with out timeframe. 

Ideate

Market Research

We did extensive market research for each of the user story categories. We searched out unique interactions and creative flows to get inspiration. 

Sketches

Our process included many rounds of paper wireframing. When sketching out all of our ideas for each user story, we encouraged each other to really get creative because even off the wall ideas may spark inspiration. Then we would get together and talk about each approach and whether they were interesting and viable.  

Mockups

By creating paper wireframes we were able to stitch them together into a basic idea for our app. We then utilized our pattern library to figure out the best way to execute our ideas. We ended up enhancing the pattern library through our work as we discovered missing patterns that needed to be included. 

Testing

By running some early user tests we were able to validate our design decisions and discover any gaps we may have missed. We printed off each screen and figured out how we could solve the gaps and simplify some of the flows. 

With several revisions in place we did another round of testing before finalizing the designs and sending off to development.