Jonny Martyr
University of Melbourne
The Digital Campus
The University of Melbourne wanted to centralise its various student-facing systems (such as enrolment, library loans, daily calendar, etc) into a single interface to vastly improve the existing student experience.
After several rounds of research & ideation, I came up with a concept for an app that would contain all the key functionality a student needs, centred around a “feed” of timely, personalised content that would raise awareness and engagement in appropriate services for each student. This social media-style feed would adapt to student behaviour and highlight content valuable to that student, leaning on similar services such as Facebook and Google Now. In this way the student could have a single app that would bring together their timetable, library loans, social events, extracurricular activities and more, while the university would have the ability to learn from and adapt to the behaviour of their students to improve their offerings.
This product eventually evolved from a concept into a fully functioning prototype, which was then delivered to the university’s IT department for continuing development.
The Brief
This project was an exciting opportunity to follow a “purist” design methodology, where the quality of design was the highest priority to the client. Our task was essentially to present an ideal vision of the university’s future digital offerings, behind which the various departments of the university could gather and develop a coherent digital strategy.
The central focus of this vision was a mobile app, known as the “Digital Campus”, that would act as a one-stop-shop for all student queries. I led a team of designers, solution architects and other UXers through design and testing on this concept, and eventually became Product Owner for a development team tasked with delivering a prototype.
This project was initially scoped to last 3 sprints, to convert existing research into a design direction. However, the positive reception of my early work resulted in continuous extension of the project, eventually lasting over 9 months before the prototype was handed over to an internal team.
The Process
We used a two-week sprint cycle (with showcases every second sprint) to retain velocity and keep the wider university engaged with the project. Our initial focus was on the thorny subject of course planning – a complicated and systems-heavy process for students, and one that causes a huge amount of churn. I led a small UX team through a combination of co-design, research and user testing, resulting in an elegant prototype solution, which allowed students to navigate their course options in a simple step-by-step process.
From here, we moved to tackling the issue of awareness and engagement in university services. Often students are uninformed or unmotivated to engage in services that are highly beneficial to them, resulting in a negative experience and a poor reflection on the university.
By centralising the various disparate student databases into a single point of truth, I was able to envision a solution that spotted patterns and opportunities in the data, and provided students with personalised recommendations for services at the appropriate times. For instance, if an international student was receiving low scores in written essays the university could recommend essay writing workshops or supplementary language education.
Throughout this project I engaged with over 50 individual students in one-on-one sessions, ran bi-weekly design presentations to university stakeholders (fulfilling a dream to give a presentation to a packed lecture hall!), and collated quantitative data from hundreds of student participants.
After 12 sprints of research and design work we were tasked with developing a working prototype. I then led a team of UXers, UI designers, project managers and developers through a six-week rapid prototyping phase, resulting in a fully-functional prototype Android app.
Challenges
Working with an organisation as large and multifaceted as a university is certainly not free from challenges. One of the principle ones I faced was the sheer complexity of course structures – students were free to build a course out of almost any classes they liked, but the complicated network of prerequisites and exclusions for qualifications meant that they needed a lot of guidance to avoid accidentally constructing courses that did not actually lead to a qualification in the end. Trying to find an elegant solution to this – on mobile, no less – took a lot of iteration, but by conducting structured, regular user testing I was able to fine-tune the solution and make sense of an incredibly complicated process.
The Outcome
Despite originally being scoped at only 3 sprints of UX work, this project ended up lasting almost a year and being one of the most productive for my agency. It spawned three side projects (including one I later took over) and became instrumental in winning work with other universities across Australia.
The prototype was ultimately taken on by the university’s own IT department for ongoing development. Departments across the university are now excited and engaged in the benefits of design thinking and the richer possibilities for delivering a good student experience.