Students, faculty, and staff at LMU use this digital portal to find needed information and complete day-to-day tasks. I worked with the IT team to re-envision this experience to be more useful, intuitive, and up-to-date.
We had a small team that included a Product Owner, Project Manager, Developer, ITS Communications Manager, and ITS Help Desk Manager.
Design Consultant, Team of One
Mar 2019 - Aug 2019
Upon hearing complaints from students, faculty, and staff about the internal portal, the IT department decided to hire a UX Designer to investigate the experience and help improve user satisfaction.
Their aim was to establish a practice of gathering feedback and improving the portal based on user needs. I appreciated this user-centered approach and explained the below process for moving forward with these goals.
To start, I focused on interviewing users and stakeholders to better understand needs and pain points, reviewing analytics to see how the portal is currently used, and reviewing feedback form responses.
I asked questions such as:
With the current navigation of the portal, findability is difficult due to long lists, unclear labels, and lack of organization. This was by far the top frustration among all participants interviewed.
“Can be hard to find what I need. There are too many links, which can get confusing. It’s not really organized.”
- Undergraduate student
“Too many links. Too confusing. Too time-consuming to go through the links."
- Administrative coordinator
Since findability was the top concern and reorganizing navigation is a fairly low-effort change to make, we decided to first focus on this as an incremental improvement.
We changed the current navigation to a mega menu, which broke down the long lists into smaller logical groups and labels that made sense to users we tested with and prioritized frequently accessed links.
I proposed updates based on usability principles, analytics data, card sorting, tree testing, and direct input from students, faculty, and staff. We decided the final structure as a team by discussing these findings.
8
months of click data reviewed
16
card sorting sessions
130
tree testing responses
Based on the above findings, I created 3 high-level approaches and showed these to 15 participants for feedback. While the “flexible and customized” approach had the highest ranking, people still liked aspects of the other options.
I also created 32 design concepts that targeted pain points and usability issues we identified and conducted sessions where participants built their own dashboard from components provided.
From these sessions, I ranked the concepts based on what participants chose to include, how high they placed the component, and sentiment about the idea.
Taking themes from participant responses in the above activities, I proposed a priority order of improvements to pursue next for the portal, including these top 5:
People expect MyLMU to be their own central hub to manage their work / school life and find and access needed info and tools.
Concepts:
Most users have 2-5 tools they use on a regular basis to complete daily tasks and therefore need easy access to.
Concepts:
Users will also use MyLMU to find unfamiliar tools and info on occasion.
Concepts:
People want greater support from LMU regarding managing urgent and administrative tasks (e.g. entering timesheets).
People are frustrated by having so many calendars and places to go to find relevant events, important dates, and times.
During my 6 months on this project, I supported the team in implementing the navigation restructure. I then presented and handed off a series of documents that recommended future improvements, a priority order for these improvements, and incremental steps to reach these states.
I loved that the end-goal of this project is really to help students achieve their dreams and goals. With a system that allows them to quickly access what they need, provide new information and resources that may be useful to them, and inform them of important deadlines and announcements, we have the potential to help students succeed.
However, the big challenge was working as the single UX Designer on a small team tackling the portal for the entire university. I found that explaining the above cause to departments and students I met with really piqued their interest. They appreciated the goal and my efforts to include them and wanted to provide their input and help connect me to more resources for the project.
