Quick read

Problem

The Learning Technology Services (LTS) department at York University needed a top to bottom digital refresh to showcase their capabilities to their clients.

Process

Through a series of UX research methods led by myself and carried out with the help of another designer, the team was able to identify the direction needed to meet the goals for the project.

Delivery

After crafting prototypes to demonstrate the departments capabilities, the team built a working site in WordPress and delivered it to the project leaders.

Overview

The Learning Technology Service (LTS) at York University was a department whose sole focus was to raise the potential of educators in the university. Their one problem: the educators didn’t know about this. LTS sought out the capabilities of myself and another designer to create a new online tool to demonstrate the department’s capabilities to faculty and staff. When engaging with the department, we understood the educators frustrations: information on the departments capabilities were limited. The project involved our team exploring user-centred design methods to understand what the potential clients, shareholders, and support staff, would need/want from their online service.

Research

Our first step was to take a look at their existing platform. We had to ask ourselves, how might we build a tool that allows educators to understand their potential for their classrooms? To understand the challenges, we conducted a brief audit and landed on these key areas for improvement:

Interaction consistency

Repeating elements on the site would behave differently from page to page, creating confusion about the intended interaction.

Information on the department

Understanding the capabilities of the department was difficult due to vague copywriting lacking depth in their process.

Stronger call-to-action

Interactive elements lacked visual and text-based clues to signify to the user that they are leading them to a new page.

From our conversations with staff in the department, it seemed like they themselves were unaware of the scope of their services. We interviewed our our department’s managers for insight on their vision of the new platform. Our goals going into the interviews were: to better understand their idea for how the department should be shown to their clients, as well as determine what their goals would be from the future website. In addition to these interviews, we also connected with our support staff to understand their day-to-day process, and see what benefit they could recieve from a refreshed platform. Their shared goals were as follows:

Create an information base of what the LTS does and how they serve their faculty.

Provide inspiration and resources for professors looking to improve their classroom experience.

Create access for support for the tools and services the department offers.

Cataloguing the information

We understood their goals, and we understood what they needed, but we still didn’t have a strong grasp of what they had to offer. To get a better view on the departments capabilities and offerings, we polled our managers for what they currently provide, and what they’d like to provide for their clients. After collecting a list of services and tools, we constructed an open card sorting exercise to organize these services. Organizing the services led to our creation of our information architecture, which in turn informed our plans for our wireframe development.

With this project, we wanted to discover: How might we create an experience that projects the values of the Learning Technology Services, while displaying the resources available to educators. To ensure our pages would be organized to its highest efficiency, we spent quite some time focusing on our information architecture. Developing our information architecture happened over a series of iterations, with gathering feedback on the layers of interaction that would occur before our end user would find what they want.

Design system

While my team member was developing the wireframes, I simultaneously developed the visual language we wanted our final prototype to have. This platform had to live within York Universities existing design guidelines for their website, so we had little space to flex some creativity.

Final designs

Conclusions

With the designed prototypes and developed WordPress site handed off to our managers, they were positioned to enable this website refresh at their convenience. We delivered the project to our managers as our contract with the team ended, leaving them to flip the switch when they desired.