UMUC Student Portal

Responsive Web Design

 

  • The student portal is a very important part of any student’s academic journey to manage and stay on track with their progress. UMUC student portal didn’t have all the key features that help students plan their academic calendar and other activities. This resulted in poor course registration numbers and early dropouts.

  • UMUC’s redesigned student portal has to offer students a streamlined and better organized administrative experience, more self-service options, improved function and consistency across mobile devices, and more.

    To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of UMUC.

  • I was responsible for coming up with the high-level design strategy for this project. I worked very closely with the business leadership and UMUC marketing team to understand their long-term goals. I was involved in the requirements gathering sessions and interviews with students and academic advisors and business leadership.

Research

We have conducted student interviews to identify their pain points and requirements.

We have conducted 3 rounds of card sorting to come up with the information architecture of the redesigned website. The information is separated into 5 major content buckets

  • Class Search & registration

  • Degree Planning

  • Academic Records

  • Finances

  • Notifications

Student Portal Sitemap

Branding and STYLE GUIDES

Before I joined UMUC, they didn't have a proper style guide, design system, or wire-framing process. I created a style guide and introduced a design system that they can build on. I have also introduced Axure to speed up the wire-framing process and created a widget library for all the designers. This has eliminated the process of creating separate redline documents and increased the efficiency of the wire-framing by 50%.

Style guide

Introducing the New Student Portal

Here are a few screens for the student dashboard, class search, class schedule, and degree planner from the UMUC Student Portal.

  • Student dashboard provides a quick overview of everything a students needs to know from their class schedules, finances, degree progress and more.

  • The class search screen allows the students to search and register for courses.

  • Students can keep a track of their class schedule across semesters.

  • Degree planner is designed to allow the students to carefully plan their courses across multiple semesters and also plan their graduation.

    Used color coding to help students differentiate the courses

    • Grey - Completed courses

    • Yellow - In progress courses

    • Green - Courses in the students cart

    • Blue - Available courses

Result

The project was launched on June 25th, 2018 and we received a great response from the students recently the leadership shared the analytics on student registration and they have increased by 22% compared to the last semester.

Lessons Learnt

Early planning and identifying issue with the design process and spending time to create tools to resolve these issues helped me save a lots of time and grief. I have identified areas within the UMUC public site and the student portal that need major overhaul like the responsive grid systems, sharing the standards across multiple teams etc and have a roadmap to implement in the future.