UMD iSchool Advising Portal: Reimagined

April – May 2024
INST406 at the University of Maryland

OVERVIEW

Finally Supporting Students and Faculty

Our reimagined advising portal manages to bring the University of Maryland’s Information School into the modern day, giving the school the advising foundation it needs to support current and future students navigating an ever-evolving institution. With just a few simple yet necessary changes, students can receive information quickly and seamlessly, advisors can better help their students, and everyone can feel the support they so desperately need from the iSchool.

Problem

UMD’s iSchool has been making strides to teach students in new and innovative ways, but their current advising system has a myriad of problems that need to be solved. Advisors are stretched too thin and left without support, students are forced to conform to strict time restrictions to get support, and the system as a whole is bogged down with an lack of communication on topics that should be considered necessary for students to succeed in the school.

Our Goal

Make sure students can obtain the information they need to graduate without friction

Give the current advising staff the tools they need to complete their work effectively

Build a strong advising foundation that can support the school’s intended growth long term

Discover

Understanding our Userbase

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To better understand the problem, we first need to understand those who are most affected by them.

Lucky for us, we are current iSchool students engrossed in the culture of our fellow iSchool students. This gives us a first-hand account of the issues and stresses caused by the current iSchool advising portal.

From our lived experience and the experiences of our classmates, we were able to discern a few key issues with the current advising portal:

– No way to schedule appointments with advisors, so students are forced to wait in long lines at specific drop-in hours to get any question answered, however large or small

– Changes to required coursework are not communicated to students directly, so they are forced to go to advisors to obtain this information, increasing the queue times during drop-in hours

– The process of entering drop-in advising requires the use of multiple third-party services, making the process feel “sluggish” and “unresponsive” overall, especially for a school focused on being at the cutting edge of technology

PRototype

Wireframe and Initial Testing

This wireframe tackled the issue of giving students more times to receive advising and giving advisors more control over their schedules through the scheduling feature. The wireframe also tackled the issue of students not getting key information quickly by creating an updates header where students can find out key information on class changes easily right on the front of the page.

We had a couple of takeaways from our user testing of this wireframe that we could use to increase the effectiveness of our advising portal:

– Users had no way to sort through advisors if needed and seemed to choose one at random

– Users wished for a more extensive pre-advising questionnaire, not only for themselves but for the advisor so they wouldn’t have to waste time during the meeting looking up students’ specific answers

– Users very rarely navigated to the FAQ and Resources pages

– Users had an overall lack of trust in the AI Chatbot, preferring to get their answers from a real human

High Fidelity Prototyping

From this feedback, we began to work on a high-fidelity prototype of our design.

Here are some of the biggest changes we made to our original design:

Brand Integration

Increasing integration with the UMD system and their current applications through style choices (header, font, color, etc.)

Improving Usability

Implementing a filter on available advisors to assist students in their selection and reducing noise by only displaying upcoming appointments on home page, making the portal easier to navigate

User Freedom

Allowing students free reign to describe their questions or concerns before the meeting, giving advisors the chance to investigate before the official meeting time

Removing Unnecessary Features

Removing the AI chatbot as users thought it went against our values

We feel that this version is more effective in solving the key issues raised before in as simple and easy to use package as possible, which was always the goal of our iSchool advising portal. For future iterations, we would have loved to flesh out the FAQ and Resource tabs, but their lack of usage during wireframe testing led us to focus more on the main flow of the portal.

View our final prototype walkthrough here:

Takeaways

What did we learn?

This project was crucial in the development of me as a designer. While building the prototype was itself a rewarding and interesting process, the real purpose of this project was to learn how to present technical ideas to a non-technical crowd. In this case, we were presenting to the Information School’s top executives. Our goal was to show them that the current advising portal was flawed and that our solution was necessary for the continued growth of the school. Being able to do so in an engaging and concise manner is vital to any UX designer, as they must constantly defend their ideas against shareholder scrutiny. The skills I learned through this project, such as presentation styles, ways to engage with audiences, and the ability to condense big ideas into small packages were all immensely valuable toward my success as a UX designer.