Website Redesign for Prime Digital Academy’s Staff Portal
Client - Prime Digital Academy
Prime is an academic institution that delivers high-level professional programs in UX Design and Full-Stack Engineering in an immersive learning environment. The Prime Portal is a tool used by staff to keep track of and interact with applicants, students and alumni.
Deliverables
Prototype tour*
* Independent work
Methods
Cognitive Walkthrough*
Contextual Inquiry
Digital Prototyping*
Project Overview
The Challenge:
Over time, the portal has broadened its scope of use by Prime staff and to better keep track of students post-graduation. This year the portal in undergoing a redesign to better facilitate workflows that often cross different work streams. The goal now is to identify how well the portal is accomplishing its current goals and how to incorporate those findings into its new redesign.
High-level goals:
Identify pain points and problem spaces within the current portal
Gain an understanding of the key tasks of the portal’s primary users
Design and prototype a solution
Research + Discovery
To begin, I wanted to start by familiarizing myself with the the primary user task flows in order to identify some of the clear pain points within the portal. I conducted a cognitive walkthrough, moving through each task in the portal and breaking them down step by step. I measured each step up against 4 questions that touched on key design themes:
Will the user try to achieve the right outcome? (Mental Model)
Is the correct action visible? (Visibility & Hierarchy)
Is there a clear connection between the control and the resulting actions? (Mapping & Consistency)
Is there sufficient and/or appropriate feedback? (Feedback)
This helped me visualize the opportunity spaces and gain a more specific idea about what could be improved upon.
User Interviews
I used my findings from the Cognitive Walkthroughs to structure a contextual Inquiry sessions with Prime staff members, drawing specific attention to the identified pain point areas . We remotely interviewed the Director of UX Instruction (which I moderated) and the Directory of Employee Partnerships. The primary goal here was to gain an understanding of the context in which the portal was used, and to get an idea of their specific needs as users.
“The portal is something that I'm not in quite as much. I think it could be used in many more ways for the work I could do”
- Director of Employer Partnerships
While the Director of UX Instruction was using the portal every day, we found that the Directory of Employer Partnerships used the portal a maximum of two hours per week. Most of the tasks they needed to do were not things that could be done, or even tracked, within the portal, despite some of them being fundamental to Prime’s mission:
Connecting alumni with Prime’s employer network
Viewing dynamic information regarding alumni and employers
Feature Ideation
I decided to focus my redesign on adding features that integrated these two tasks, as well as adding features that both of our interviewees expressed the need for:
A way to notify other users to changes, updates, and tasks that needed addressing within the portal
A way to accommodate the dynamic needs of its users
Improvements and New Features
Improve student and alumni profiles
Profile owners will now be able to update their information themselves, helping to keep their information relevant and usable by the Prime staff
Alumni will be able to tag their profile with their skills and interests, which staff can then use to connect students to jobs through Prime employers
Job Search
A 'Job Search’ feature will be added that provides a way for Prime staff to search for available jobs within their employer network.
Notifications
A Notifications feature will be added to keep Staff updated when students or alumni update their profiles with new information
Notifications tab
If users have new notifications, a red dot will appear next to the bell icon with a number signifying how many notification they have unread.
The bolded text in each alert navigates us to relevant pages that the user may want to view in order to address each notification.
Alumni Profile
Now students and alumni can add interests or skills to their profile, like UX Research and Accessibility. These are used to communicate to Prime staff what skills profile owners are trying to leverage in future roles and/or what fields they are trying to move into.
The ‘Find Jobs’ button in the ‘Professional’ tab will link users to a job search where they can connect alumni to Employer jobs
Job Search
When navigating to the Job Search page via an Alumni profile, skills and interested will automatically be used to filter the search using their personal tags.
The Job Search feature streamlines the process of connecting alumni with Prime employers, which was found to be one of the tasks that our focus user (Directory or Employer Partnerships) wanted to be able to accomplish easily within the portal.
Here the user can select individual jobs and send them via email using the ‘Share’ button
Sharing a job posting
The user can select one or more recipients to receive the job postings.
There is space to leave a friendly note and any additional information that might be useful to include. Lets click in the text box to see an example then go ahead and send the message.
The message has been sent successfully. Maggie will receive an email with a list of jobs just a couple of days after she changed her alumni profile status.
This timely follow-up makes Maggie feel supported even after she has graduated from the program, and it reminds her of the value in keeping her Prime community in the loop
Recap + Reflection
The Prime portal is a space that aims to work for all its staff. But these users have a wide array of goals, and redesigning a portal that met all these needs in the time allotted was not feasible. I therefore chose to focus on the needs of one user, which goes against my instincts as a UX designer. However, the work of the Director of Employer Partnerships is fundamental to Prime’s mission, and those needs were not being proportionally represented in the functions of the portal.
This was a lesson in perspective. Perhaps she is just one user, but her role carries a lot of weight. We’re often taught to think about the importance of users (and categorize them as primary and secondary) in terms of frequency and quantity. But asking the question: “How fundamental is this users purpose to the overall mission of the client?” can be just as important, and can help identify ways that some user needs fall through the cracks.