SHRADDHA SWAROOP

My Role

For this project, I played the the role of principal UX designer. I used this project to teach students about the UX process at Long Beach State. I lead a team in doing user interviews, UX insight report, personas, site map, sketches, wireframes, style guide, digital prototypes and testing the prototypes with users from my target audience to uncover usability issues.

The Challenge

Long Beach State had recently unveiled a responsive site for Beachboard but it was still having problems such as crashing during task completion and missing a feature like being able to chat with fellow classmates and peers. This app sought to resolve those issues.

The Client

The director of the department of information technology at the university wants to find out what features on Beachboard students and instructors use most to enhance the existing Beachboard app. He thinks there should be a chat room on it but the rest is up to me. He also said that most students use iPhones so we are to do an iOS app.

The Target Audience

The target audience for this app are students and faculty at Long Beach State. The primary target audience is the student who is:

• • Age: Between 22 and 45 years old
• • Status: Full-time student at Long Beach State
• • Employment: Part-time job on or off-campus
• • Technical savvy: This student is classified as a millennial and primarily uses their phone as a communication tool. Most often through texting or social media apps.

UX RESEARCH

Interviews

The first step is understanding the users' frustrations, motivations and goals for Beachboard. I created an Interview Script and interviewed 6 people from my target audience which includes both students and teachers at Long Beach State. Immediately after the interviews I wrote Interview Summaries and then wrote a UX Insight Report to synthesize my findings.

Competitive analysis

The next step was taking a look at the competitors to Beachboard and discover the usability issues and sweet spots of each. The competitors I studied included Canvas, Google Classroom and Moodle. I reviewed each on all 10 heuristics developed by Jakob Nielsen. After collecting the data in this chart I wrote a Heuristic Report on my findings.

Persona & empathy map

I created a persona and empathy map based exclusively on the data I collected through my interviews. Her name is Susanna the Student and she is integral to the design process.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

User stories

I created User Stories for all the tasks that user may want to have access to in the Beachboard iOS app. These stories also doubled as tasks for my card sort activity that the site map is based on.

Site map

I took the user data I collected through an open card sort to creat this site map.

Task flows

it is very important to take the time to really think about the structure and flow of the pages and how that will lead to better user experiences for your users. User flows demonstrate the step-by-step elements required to allow the user and the business to accomplish their objectives. I created a few for the primary tasks that Susanna the Student needs to accomplish on the Beachboard app:

DESIGN

Sketches

I started off sketching the screens for my Beachboard app following Luke Wroblewski's Mobile First methodology. I began with the Home Page and sought the feedback of my client before resuming the task for the whole app. When I am sketching I want to do several ideas for the Home Page for the client to pick from. At a minimum I do three: One that is safe, one that is medium and one that is reaching for the stars. I often think the user won't be interested in the reaching-for-the-stars idea but my clients often prefer that one over the safe ones. Here is a sample of the Login and Home Page sketches:

Wireframes

When I reach the wireframes stage, I get very detail-oriented. In this step I go from the general idea I provide in the sketches to wires that provide every type of functionality that will be in the final prototype. In the wireframe stage, I stay away from color, real content in photos and text as well as stylized font.