Michigan Accessibility Plugin
Michigan Accessibility Plugin
Student Center: The Landing page for the software of interest
Problem:
The Student Center is an interface that is part of a larger ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. The students at the University of Michigan must use this software to complete certain academic tasks such as adding/dropping classes, check transcripts, and pay tuition. Yet everyday, over 40,000 students must use this system to prolonged due to inefficiency in their designs and interaction”.
Research
As the lead researcher, we wanted to brainstorm for some inquiry and wanted to find these Research questions:
What are the constraints that are holding the University to implement a new system/redesign of it?
How do Students use the Student Center?
What is the overall satisfaction of using the software?
Gathering Data
To tackle our fundamental research questions, we sought to get information from users (students) by sending out preliminary surveys for a formal User Interview Session. Additionally, we wanted to speak with one of the main stakeholders, the IT- services. Speaking with IT-services will help us understand why Student Center is implemented the way it is.
User Interviews
Surveys
While we had interviews with users, we had a chance to ask the users about their experience and dive into a contextual Inquiry
Contextual inquiry
In addition to the contextual inquiry, we also found that some students had the opportunity to introduce their ‘student center’ system equivalent to our team. As a result, we had some data about competitor interfaces. Thus, allowing us to competitively analyze systems.
Competitive Analysis
Findings
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We found from the major Stakeholder and implementor of the system (Michigan ITS) that:
1) The Student Cetner is only a small aspect of the large (ERP) system
2) There’s a large push from the University to steer towards cloud-based services
3) Developing a system from scratch takes too much time and resources
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From our survey data, contextual inquiry, and competitive analysis we found that users felt that:
N = 47 (mix of graduate and undergraduate students)
“It's relatively easy to use, except that navigation is a bit difficult sometimes and I'm afraid to use the back button on my browser.”
“link to view a calendar-view/visual student schedule (kinda hidden behind multiple clicks, hard to find if you don't already know about it). Too many links to get to the planning/registration area, hard to tell which one specifically to click to "choose your upcoming classes," unintuitive.”
Generally unfavorable usability
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We found that through seeing the overall usability from the users that there were 4 main categories:
1) Erratic Informatic Architecture:
Unclear to users the overall hierarchy and priority of information on the student center landing page
2) Inaccessible Design Components:
Small font and low contrast ratio between foreground and background.
3) Non-descriptive Navigation:
Non-descriptive navigation that doesn’t aid the user to easily understand the relationship between their location on a page.
4) Outdated Aesthetics:
Outdated aesthetics that cause a change in perception of usability.
Solution: Plugin
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Original Implemented Design of Student Center
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Michigan Accessibility Plug-In (Design proposal)
Michigan Accessibility Plug-In (Design proposal)
We found that fastest way to engineer a minimally viable solution to scale that encapsulate accessible guidelines and doesn’t require changing the entire system avoiding any technical disruption.
Impact
Worked and communicated with IT-S services for proposed design. They have made adjustments to aesthetic of the landing page, however the Student Center, due to constraints of the software have made minimal changes.