Last May, Provost Russ Moore and Senior Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer Kelly Fox announced the Unified Student Experience (USE) Project, an effort to create a more streamlined online and in-person student experience aimed at transforming today's fragmented support structure for students.
To date, the project team has focused and begun to make progress on the following areas:
- Understanding the student experience
- Designing for student success
- Improving the digital experience
Understanding the student experience, designing for student success
The working group on user experience standards and best practices has continued to build on the work completed in the summer and fall of 2017 by collecting and analyzing a myriad of additional user data to further understand the student experience. To date, the project team has: 听
- Established design principles and created student profiles
- Translated data into aligned specific, measurable design requirements
- Transformed requirements into ten different designs, which were prototyped and narrowed down to one design
- Developed a robust, rich understanding of the student experience as students complete major university business and transaction
- Started collaborative and iterative efforts to design and develop the new platform
Leading with the student experience in mind, the project team has been focused on bringing together students and business service providers to continue designing for successful student experience with the new platform.
Students and business service providers working together to design for a successful student experience with the new platform. Image shows a group of students and stakeholders during a design sprint.
Sandra Sawaya, academic design strategy manager in the Office of Information Technology and co-lead of the working group on user experience standards and best practices, says any future platform that is built for students will be the product of significant student input followed by iterative design.
鈥淲e鈥檙e starting with student input, using that to inform a design that we believe meets student needs,鈥� Sawaya said. 鈥淭hen we bring the design that emerges back to students for their input, continuing to iterate like so.鈥�
Fall rollout
The USE project team is working to build a new platform that will eventually replace My抖阴旅行射Info for students, consolidating all of the 90-plus student-facing systems that exist today. This new platform will be a one-stop-shop for students to find all their notifications and resources to support their student experience.
Paul O'Brian, program manager in the Office of Information Technology and co-lead of the user experience technical considerations and implementation working group, says the team will have a prototype in production this July, which a select group of students will start using to help the team improve the design further.
鈥淭his new system will reimagine what a student portal can be and try to address what we鈥檝e heard are the current sources of pain with My抖阴旅行射Info,鈥� O鈥橞rian said. 鈥淲e expect we will be ready for a broader release to all students this fall.鈥�
O鈥橞rian added that the initial fall rollout will not be a replacement of My抖阴旅行射Info. 鈥淭he new platform that is available in the fall will be incomplete, but it will seek to provide a significant improvement to what students have been using to date.鈥�
Improving the digital experience
Significant headway was made on modifying applications and services to increase use of single sign-on. Formally called Federated Identity Services, single sign-on allows a student to use one log-in to access a variety of campus resources.
In addition, several new links to existing resources will soon be added to My抖阴旅行射Info, such as housing, the Rec Center, libraries and parking.
O鈥橞rian said all of these resources will eventually be available to the new USE platform.
鈥淭he idea was to create an interim solution by getting many of these resources tied together on My抖阴旅行射Info,鈥� O鈥橞rian said. 鈥淭his can happen much more quickly than designing and building a new platform.鈥�
O鈥橞rian added that once the new platform is built, that doesn鈥檛 mean the end of this initiative.
鈥淭he intent is for students and service providers to always be working together in a state of continuous improvement,鈥� said O鈥橞rian. 鈥淲e will always be learning about students, their preferences and how we as service providers can best meet their needs.鈥�
