BrainStation Portal
BrainStation offers a variety of intensive courses in digital design, every student has access to a portal, which is set up to help students organize course material and assets. One of the sprint challenges of the User Experience Immersive bootcamp was to propose a re-design of the current student portal.
Working collaboratively with 3 other colleagues on this 4 day sprint challenge, a proposal was made that the main focus of the portal should be on assisting students with a better way to visually organize their project progress, track weekly UI challenges, easily have access to upcoming events, and view of a daily class schedule. A “search” function was created to make it easier for students to quickly find the content they were looking for. Top navigation was designed to help simplify the organizational structure of the portal.
As a 10 week immersive bootcamp course can be quite intensive and overwhelming at times, we wanted our design to aesthetically help students to effortlessly find all the resources they needed to succeed.
Day 1
On the first day of the 4 day sprint challenge, we began our process by individually doing research and finding inspirations on current trends and portal designs. We then came together and discussed our findings by creating a mood board on InVision. We then created a list of interview questions and conducted initial user interviews before deciding on our project goal, user journey, and target moment. We compiled a bunch of "how might we" questions on post-it notes and voted on which areas we all agreed to focus on.
Day 2
During the second day of the sprint was when we started to sketch out possible features and drew out wireframes. Our group decided to do a round of crazy 8's where we would sketch out 8 different ideas at 1 minute intervals, this helped us to quickly jot down any ideas we were thinking of. From the crazy 8's we then each drew out a wireframe with our possible solutions. Once everyone finished with their wireframes we all pinned up our solution on the wall and went around viewing and speed critiquing each one. We placed stickers on features that we found interesting and post-it notes on areas that we were confused about. At the end of day 2, we decided on which wireframe our group wanted to focus on and iterated on that design based on the feedback we got.
Day 3
On the third day of the sprint we took our wireframes and digitized them using Sketch. A main wireframe design for the pages were determined before we separated tasks to transition our wireframes into high fidelity, where we each worked on separate parts of the portal. The current BrainStation style guide was referenced in creating our high fidelity designs.
Day 4
On the final day of the sprint, we finalized our high fidelity designs and put them onto InVision to create our prototype for usability testings. After we conducted 5 rounds of user testing, we took all the feedback and created a session output. We made notes on what improvements needed to be implemented and did some iterations on our designs. We had overall positive comments on the portal on how clean and visually effortless it was to navigate through the site. The main issues that came up was with the copy used around defining UI challenges and the icon used to upload their challenges.
High Fidelity Design
Feature 1
A design feature to help students track UI challenges will keep students engaged with class material. A simplified way to view all the challenges to be completed, how many have been completed individually and which team is leading will aid to create higher importance to complete all optional challenges throughout the course.
Feature 2
Being able to keep up on weekly progress was a main feature that was created to help students organize their productivity to see if they are caught up on all class material. The student is able to manually check off content completed for each topic at their own pace. An “add note” feature was implemented to help create a more personable experience where the user can add/manage their own to-do list.