A course planning tool that aims to simplify students' course registration process.
During the Winter 2021 semester, I took on a UX design role with UMSI's Design Clinic to work on a course planning tool called BiostatPlan. My team and I partnered with the University of Michigan School of Public Health to help improve this web application. Our task was to evaluate the usability of the existing design and offer solutions for a more user-friendly interface.
User Research
Prototyping
User Testing
January 2021 - April 2021
Adobe XD
Figma
Tim Wang
Mansi Bhatt
Peggy Du
BiostatPlan's interface was confusing to use and lacked critical course information. This was a problem because it did not help students plan their schedules.
A redesigned interface to help Biostatistics M.S. students plan out courses for the four-semester long program. The updated website includes all necessary course information and tracks each student's progress towards their degree.
The full interactive prototype can be found here.
We started this project by first learning more about BiostatPlan. We met with our client to learn about the purpose behind the website and understand their goals. We then explored the product ourselves before mapping out the existing user flow.
My team conducted a heuristic analysis to assess the existing design. Although it was functional, aspects of the original design were unclear. My team and I identified a handful of problems, including irrelevant features and poor error prevention.
We examined other campus tools to understand how they support students in their course planning process.
To help us gain deeper insight into students' current course planning habits and their experiences using BiostatPlan, we organized a series of user interviews. In total, we met with three users, all second-year students in the Biostatistics M.S. program.
“We need at least 48 [credits]. The course load is comparatively heavier than other masters programs across the campus, so [I] do sometimes worry about a little bit about courses.”
“[The BiostatPlan website] reloaded and every progress is gone when I was bouncing between different websites to find class information.”
With the collected data, my team created an affinity map to synthesize our insights. Our data revealed that the website's issues included poor error prevention, a lack of relevant content, and unintuitive navigation. In addition, the product itself lacked discoverability, as first-year students are often unaware that it is available to them.
I created user personas to help my team empathize with our users. We found that 2 main user groups existed: first-year students seeking guidance in course planning and second-year students who focused on graduating on time.
My team reframed our insights into the following HMW statement to help generate possible solutions.
"How might we design a product that helps our users plan their semester schedules so that they meet all program requirements and graduate on time?"
We started sketching possible solutions and discussed the main functionalities in each concept.
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We combined our ideas into low-fidelity wireframes for the new website design. Based on the priorities of our users, we made sure the redesign included a list of reference links and displayed each user's progress through their degree.
Following the design system from our client, I used Figma to create a high-fidelity prototype.
My team and I used our high-fidelity iteration to conduct formal usability tests with 2 graduate students. Our goal was to assess our product's overall usability and determine if we effectively solved our users' problems.
Overall, we received a lot of positive feedback on our prototype from both users. Each student felt it was a great improvement on the existing website and confirmed that our product was something they would use. Based on their responses, I identified a few areas for improvement:
Improve discoverability of course path options
Users had trouble figuring out how to add a course path to the planner.
Correct degree progress chart
Students noticed that the epidemiology requirement was missing.
Bring out more course information
Users felt there was too much information hidden within each course's drop-down menu.
I am very pleased with how this product came out and am proud that my team was able to successfully deliver on our first client project. I discovered how stakeholder requirements are much more complex in real-world scenarios and learned how to incorporate them while still advocating for our users.
My hope is that our product will help improve the course planning process for UM Biostatistics students. Looking ahead, I believe the next steps could include conducting usability tests with our latest iteration and possibly passing our design off to data scientists to begin full development.
