To develop a product whereby all staff could gain access to an integrated 360° view of their students.
In order to provide insight in a systematic and informed manner that could then enable more effective targeting of support.
Whilst conducting user research to very busy and rather technology in-experienced end users proved to be initially challenging. The entire project was joyful and a great insight to working with the largest academic institution in the United Kingdom (and one of the largest in Europe) by student number / and one of the world’s largest universities.
- Heuristics Evaluation
- Stakeholder Management
- User Interviews
- Affinity Mapping
- Competitive & Comparative Analysis
- Feature Prioritisation
- Information Architecture
- Site Mapping
- User Flows
- Usability Testing
- Wire-framing
- Rapid Prototyping
- Making better use of appropriate (just in time as well as pre-emptive) touch points with students to engage with them in an authentic and purposeful manner. This avoids the student being overloaded by interventions from different teams/areas.
- Being able to further target proactive interventions for students, by drawing on insight collectively gained by others.
- Measuring the value and effectiveness of individual, collective and integrated interventions (against appropriate, systematic KPMs and KPIs).
- Gaining better insight and understanding of the student experience and satisfaction of receiving integrated and informed support.
- Gaining efficiencies when supporting students by avoiding duplication of support.
- Using this insight and understanding of the student’s whole experience, to provide independent and/or specialist support while coordinating as appropriate with other teams who are or may need to support the student.
- Being able to attribute value to effectiveness of different support interventions.
- Providing a consistent and coordinated experience for students, across channels and staff.
The following must be carefully assessed are the must have features in the product:
- Assess privacy and data protection constraints.
- Information needed by different student-facing roles (PLA + AL) and whether this can be displayed meaningfully.
- How can different views of the student be created, depending on staff role and students’ journey. How easily can staff change these views.
- How to best display recent student interactions with other staff members.
- What meaningful key performance metrics and engagement insights should be presented.
- How to derive and recommend interventions, how can they be tracked.
- Data and integration requirements; how data flows into and from other systems, to keep information up-to-date and drive data-informed actions:
How to integrate with SIP to track interventions and show which communications have received by the student. - How this will link and integrate with a similar prototype T&L already developed for the DSE platform.
End user primarily consisted of 3 main user personas.
- Students
- ALs (Associate Lecturers)
- PLA (Personal Learning Advisors)
Focusing on two specific parts of a student journey for an AL/PLA
Employee (AL/PLA) Persona:
Associate Lecturer Feedback Grid:
Associate Lecturer (AL) User Persona:
PLA/EA Empathy Map:
PLA User Persona:
Scenarios are descriptive or pictorial stories of the users or personas we are designing for. Scenarios involve a user performing certain actions or simulations to accomplish a goal. It also involves using a product, service or prototype to accomplish certain goals in their day-to-day activities or otherwise. Scenario stories also help researchers figure user objectives. It can be employed at the time of usability testing to determine the extent to which a product can capture value or resolve a challenge a user is facing.
SCENARIO 1 – Associate Lecturer View:
Georgie is onboarding with the OU and wants support with understanding course content.
SCENARIO 3 – Personal Learning Advisor:
Georgie is onboarding with the OU for a new module and is eligible for PLA support.
SCENARIO 2 – Associate Lecturer View:
Georgie, a student with the OU has been working hard to move on from her Level 1 studies into her Level 2, she’s failed and wants guidance on what’s next?
SCENARIO 4 – Educational Advisor (EA):
Georgie, a student with the OU has been working hard to move on from her Level 1 studies into her Level 2, she’s failed, and she’s had a medical issue and wants to know what’s next.
A requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how to do it. For requirements to be effectively implemented and measured, they must be specific, unambiguous and clear.
Below is a list of data and integration points needed for a working prototype.
User-centred approach to knowledge extraction and understanding was conducted via interviews and workshops with identified stakeholders. (ALs and PLAs)
Prototype developed in an iterative process, alongside the AL and PLA workshops.
The usability survey enables designers to have a litmus test of how the system is felt to perform and where the gaps are in the user experience.
It provides quantitative feedback that can be measured across the beginning and end of a project lifecycle
The questionnaire has been designed with a mixed bag of positive and negatively drawn sentiment related statements. So all answers being ‘strongly agree’ would not be a perfect usability score.
Thoughts and feelings from ALs and PLAs post workshops
AL – Usability Scores for current systems
AL – Usability Scores post prototype
PLA – Usability Scores; Average scores of system usability across the PLAs surveyed
PLA – Usability Scores; Average scores of usability of the Prototype pages
This primary objective of this POC is to develop a system whereby all staff could gain access to an integrated 360° view of the student