TEAM
Solo (Academic project)
ROLE
UXR
UI Design & Development
SCOPE
Mobile design
Visual design
TOOLS
Miro
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
OVERVIEW- The what?
“Faculty E-kit” was designed and developed from the scratch to build an effective system for the faculties to help them get freed as well as feel secured from the existing manual system of managing the academic activities and to be equipped with the right level of the information
VIEW PROTOTYPE[HOD POV]
THE PROBLEM- The why?
The typical manual maintenance system provides less security in saving the data; some data may be lost due to mismanagement. The limitations of the existing system includes inaccurate details, error prone, paper work, report production is slow and time consuming.
THE SOLUTION- The how?
A defined idea of the application “Faculty E-kit” was crafted intending to avoid all the drawbacks of existing system and meant to give more easiness to the faculties as well as the head of the department by including all the academic management features.
CONTEXT
- a quick brief of the product
IDEATION
- brainstorming the modules & key feature functionalities
- HOW I EXPLORED -
. D I S C O V E R .
Since this was one of my academic projects, starting off by getting the idea finalized by the project guide, the research phases carried out were,
Initial research
Information about the institute, how the existing system works, the individual roles and how the data maintenance process has been carried out was taken into account as the initial step of the project.
So what are the concerns?
Upon collecting the basic details, the pain points popped up on my mind were,
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No proper data maintenance/quick find of student academic details and the academic work details of faculties were followed
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No prior notifications of faculty works were provided and it made the system slow and time-consuming
Competitive analysis
The main applications used by the institute were “Google classroom” which facilitates sharing notes and assignments and “MyKlassroom” which shares the same features as Google classroom with an added quiz option.
"Both of these applications were student focused rather than bringing values to the faculties' work structure"
Competitive analysis
Insights
Almost 50% of the features idea-ted for “Faculty E-Kit” were present on “MyKlassroom” but with various limitations,
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No proper maintenance/updated calendar
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Cannot upload/view time-table
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Notifications/ event news not shared with the respective on required time leading to time-conflicts
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No option to check students’ add-on/ extras (feedback forms) resulting in searching for manual receipts
A deep insight into the “MyKlassroom” website gave me a better understanding of what was the usage frequency of each feature, feature with less updates, lack of consistency on significant features etc., also to amplify the system functionality.
NOTE: Since the layouts of staff version were similar to student ver, screenshots of the student ver was used here but the insights were carried out using the staff login.
Homepage
Nav menu 1
Nav menu 3
Homepage
"Myklassroom" benchmark analysis
Product Metrics
The market gap features from the competitive analysis phases were framed to make “Faculty E-Kit” a viable product.
While I was able to identify and understand the competitors, I noticed that the uncontested market place lay between students’ academics and the management which completely gives no feature of monitoring for HODs and the faculties.
Market positioning map
User Research
As a next phase of my research, I decided to collect data from multiple perceptions to synthesize the findings in order to frame the persona.
Survey (Diary Study)
To better understand the everyday work-life of the faculties . .
I chose diary study method considering their busy schedule and the number of faculties.
Since the faculties and Head of the department were already following the manual scheduling method right from the start, it was easy to collect qualitative data about their behaviors, activities and expectations.
Moving on to the Staff monitors/Assistant HODs who were allocated for the daily data maintenance (staff duty allocations, extras (transport data, student add-on course details, maintaining late-comers list etc.)), the brief handbook was the only source they maintained which was hard to search according to particular date and required assistance and approval of HOD on regular basis.
Insights
"..We use the brief hand-book as our only customary source other than whatsapp"
"The manual scheduling way is frustrating .."
After a course of two weeks of dairy study reports, I synthesized the results of the data.
Almost all of the faculties followed the same routine everyday which includes,
Log-ins - Checks schedules (time-table, morning duty allocations if any, list of latecomers of their respective classes etc.) - starts class
A simple scenario based on the contextual analysis
The discoveries include,
Meet the 3 personas' !
The 3 personas' focus on each of their "Yellow stops" (the frustrations while following the manual system) and "Green stops" (how they actually want to solve those frustrations).
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To know why the above mentioned "Yellow stops" occur & how it's being solved so far in the manual system ⬇️
Read the in-depth persona context here
. D E S C R I B E .
HMW Phase
"How might we reduce the user's frustration & help them have better days at work?"
Framing “How might we?” questions gave a concise idea for the design ideation phase.
Brainstorming
While brainstorming a variety of possible features, I used the MoSCoW method and analyzed the value of each idea based on user impact and development effort. This helped me settle on a list of final features.
Features needed
2 Logins: For HOD & For Faculty (solution to add Asst.HOD login with HOD)
Modules
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Event updates & Quick notifications
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Assignment approval
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Duty [Calendar view] updates
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Manage daily agenda
Success Metrics: The 3 ‘Cs’
. D E S I G N .
Information Architecture
To re-evaluate and understand the depth of the users’ interactions, primary use cases were framed to guide the prototype of the application.
App Architecture-HOD login
App Architecture-Faculty login
GUI
The atoms of the UI direction used for the final prototype design.
Wire-frames & User-testing
I decided to re-do my designs initially did for the academics since it was very simple and not-so-user-friendly, so I used it as a reference and came up with the quick wireframes to be tested by the users.
User-testing phase gave option for the further iterations in design as well as the flow of the project.
The features covering the main functionality of the project were tested to enhance the application in terms of both functionality and user-flow.
Some of the major insights from the user testing phase were,
~ Unintuitive
~ Ambiguity
~ Impulse states
~ Prioritizing the features
~ Replacements / Additions
To better understand the key points from the usability testing phase⬇️
. D E V E L O P .
UI design: Hi-Fi Screens
Applying the visuals onto the revised mid-fidelity wireframes
HOD POV
FACULTY POV
NOTE: Categories "Agenda" and "Events" has the same functionalities for both the HOD and Faculty POVs.
UI development (the student-faculty theme app)
Since this was an academic project that required a full MVP visualization from design to development phase, I managed to complete the MVP promptly. An android application using XML & Java as the front-end and SQLite as the back-end was the end product.
. R E T R O S P E C T I V E .
Feedbacks
Since I re-designed few of the modules from my academic UI reference, I approached some of the college professionals for the initial feedback session.
Some of the important critics and the mental wellness (Yes! On an average 60-90%, teachers are facing various psychological impacts during online classes) insights I was able to receive were,
The app
The mind
The app
What's next ?
As a next step, I would like to try implementing this project for all the departments in the college along with the following feature updates,
App link
To enhance the ease of use for HODs & faculties’ assignments module by integrating “Google classroom” to review/ share the contents submitted by the students or to any other external application to perform/monitor quiz ,academic tasks etc.,
Additional features
The essential features like registering for the college transport, to book/conduct staff only events, option to include faculties’ input in syllabus, class allocation, time-table schedule planning.
Student portal
Since online classes became the norm because of the pandemic,framing the modules for students like live videos, activity rooms etc., can be added.
More feasible
Make the application a web based platform with good database maintenance and defined information structure to implement it in other institutions & even at schools.
The lesson
Start from the scratch
Something i experienced through this project was rather than focusing and giving priority to key features or the High-fidelity designs and ending up confused and over-whelmed mid-way, maintain a structured flow from sketching the on-boarding to the final screen.
Make use of that TIME!
Getting that research studies might take time and energy than expected, use the spare time to collect the other required insights/references or a quick back-end study for the hassle-free iterations to be carried out further.
ART OF THE LONG VIEW = BIG IMPACT
A product needs constant updates or tweaks for a long run which is a must when you have an idea to expand it from 15 to 50 or more. Always have an eagle view starting from that little brainstorming sesh.
