Overview

At the Learning Technology Service (LTS) at York University, I worked together with another designer to create a new online tool to demonstrate the department’s capabilities to faculty and staff. The project involved our team exploring user-centred design methods to understand what the potential clients, shareholders, and support staff, would need/want from their online service. When joining the team, the state of the website was incredibly minimalistic to a fault. With limited information being presented, as well as inconsistent interactive elements, the department heads recognized there was room for improvement. They sought out the help from myself and another designer to help them understand what they wanted their website to be, and how we could help them get there.

We had to ask ourselves, how might we build a tool that allows educators to understand their potential for their classrooms? To understand the challenges, we conducted a usability audit and landed on these key areas for improvement:

• Interaction Consistency
  
• Stronger Call-to-actions
• Information on the Department

Research

From our conversations with staff in the department, it seemed like many inside and outside of the team were unaware of the scope of their services. We interviewed our our department’s managers for insight on their vision of the new platform. Our goals going into the interviews were: to better understand their idea for how the department should be shown to their clients, as well as determine what their goals would be from the future website.

Manager Interview Key Takeaways

• Create an information base of what the LTS does and how they serve faculty.
  
• Establish a point of contact for troubleshooting.
• Provide inspiration and resources for professors looking to improve how they run their classes.

Our next steps were to empathize with our support staff and interview them to understand their current day-to-day processes. This helped us identify any large frustrations or difficulties.

Staff Interview Key Takeaways

• The staff were missing a singular database of information regarding the tools and services LTS provides.
  
• There is no publicly available support for any tools and services the department offers besides contacting the support staff.

To get a better view on what the department had to offer, we polled our managers for what they currently offer, and what they’d like to offer. With this information, we constructed an open card sorting exercise to organize these services. Organizing the services led to our creation of our information architecture, which in turn informed our plans for our wireframe development.

Ideation

With this project, we wanted to discover: How might we create an experience that projects the values of the Learning Technology Services, while displaying the resources available to educators. To ensure our pages would be organized to its highest efficiency, we spent quite some time focusing on our information architecture. Developing our information architecture happened over a series of iterations, with us going back and forth with feedback from low fidelity wireframes.

Design System

While developing the wireframes, we also simultaneously tried to develop the visual style we wanted our final prototype to have. This platform had to live within York Universities existing design guidelines for their website, so we had little space to flex some creativity.

Final designs

Conclusions

With the designed prototypes and developed WordPress site handed off to our managers, they were positioned to enable this website refresh at their convenience.