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UOM
The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria.
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Redesign Orion - Research Computing Services Portal (A Prototype)
RCSP is supporting Researchers in their research goals with computing and data solutions. They are available only to University of Melbourne research staff and students, including continuing and fixed term academic staff, and graduate researchers (Research by Higher Degree students).
Project Brief
A next generation accessible UI was required to build for this portal and I was employed to to implement a seamless user experience in terms of accessibility and usability features of the product in a timeframe of 12 weeks. My responsibilities included working on the three levels of UCD- UX, UI and User Experience as below-
• Lead workshops related to User Testing and gather requirements to iterate the product for better user experience.
• Collaborate with Business head, Developers and other stakeholders to understand user requirements.
• Rapid build of prototype using tools like InVision and adobe suite.
• Document the process and findings.
• Work towards getting the final Prototype to be handed over to the Developers.
Design process and Planning
Project Participants and Collaboration
Business Heads - 2 Developer/s - 1 Technical Writer - 1 UX Strategy and Design - 1 (me)
Software used
Collaboration & Documentation - Miro board, MS Teams, Adobe suite and Powerpoint
Interactive Prototype - Adobe XD
Product Overview
I was given a walkthrough of the existing portal design by our product team. I kicked of my task by playing around in the existing design-below and understanding the workflow.
Primary Task Flow - How it works
Based on the standard user personas and my understanding, learning and all the inputs that I gathered on how a user would complete a task in the portal, I created a streamlined version of the task flow as the base of our design initiation. Some stakeholders felt that "Activity" would be a better word instead of "Project".
The steps involved in getting the access approved to their resources are as below-
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The user logs in with their university credentials.
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They land-up in the dashboard that prompts them to create an Activity. Activity is termed as Project in the existing design as shown above.
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To create an Activity, the user needs to fill a form.
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The form requires details on the on ARO ( Accountable Resource Owner) which needs to be validated to proceed to approval.
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Once the project approval is submitted, the user receives a notification on the approval.
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Post project creation, the user can access various resources, create desktops, add and modify storage.
User Flow - Focus on specific user
We needed to start our series of workshops to get more and more feedback and iterate our designs to achieve the outcome as desired by our target users. To initiate this I worked on my first user flow to get validated and tested amongst our team and other stakeholders before creating a more detailed wireframes the on the user navigation.
A sample user flow designed to create an Activity is as below-
Live chat helped students in the real time to sort out any technical problem. Many other instant queries were answered leaving the students with a delightful user experience.
Research & Testing (Focus Group) - Virtual Workshop Preparation
High Fidelity Wireframe
I was leading multiple virtual workshops that were conducted to extract user feedback on the design workflow on three iterative levels. The first two levels mainly focussed on the page navigation, user interaction with different UI elements and task completion in the design like creating, editing, deleting an Activity and requesting resources.
Having an accessible and user friendly Form was one of the most essential requirement of our users. Hence there were a good amount of validation done in the Form design considering the best UX practices in the same.
Workshops- User Scenarios, Feedback and Usability Tests
The workshops helped us to extract the user pain points and also gave us an idea of further improvements in the following iteration (prototype). We understood that based on different user types, we needed to optimise our UI to meet the needs of different users.
The Usability tests broadly highlighted three types of users who returned to the portal for specific needs.
1 Novice User 2. Novice/Expert User 3. Expert User
Based on our users' behaviour and expectation from the prototype, I created different scenarios as they were navigating in the UI as below-
High Fidelity Mockup
The third iteration (Prototype 3) was based on a consolidated user testing done in all the workshops and a high fidelity mock-up as per the oranisations' brand styleguide.
Iconography- Apart from the library icons which were used by the design team, I created some custom icons for a better user perception and aesthetic usability. Some of which are as below-
Sample Screens - Below are some high fidelity mocked up screens
Login Screen
Dashboard with no Activities
Add Activitivity Form
Activitivity Details
Notifications
Home - After adding 3 resources
My Resources - After adding resources to the Actvity
Delete Activity - Confirmation
Multiuser Login System
Researchers were interested in adding and sharing resources with their students, colleagues and friends within the university. Protype 3 had an important addition to the functionality. The previous versions were a Single User Portal system. Protype 3 came up with an addition to Multiuser Login System to meet the needs of our users expectation.
Manage User - Add User
Manage User Details
Outcome
I have been fortunate to have the pleasure in working with the leaders in the Research domain and the technical teams in the Orion Research Computing Services. It was a great exposure and numerous learnings that I am carrying with me which I feel would be extremely beneficial for the upcoming projects.
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