MY UTEP Student Portal

Project Overview
University of Texas at El Paso single sign on portal that connects students, faculty, and staff to most of their online services in one convenient location.  

The goal of this project was to identify any usability issues with the existing application and determine the critical features to prioritize for the next iteration of the product.

This is one of the multiple research projects we have done for this application. This project was only focus on the student’s role since they are the top one priority users of the application.
Role
User Research, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing

July 2020 - December 2020
Background
I am half of the design team at my.utep.edu. I joined the team 7 years ago as one of the three designers. One year later, after I joined, the team changed from three designers to two. I am responsible for leading UX and UI design across the application. MY UTEP is one of the numerous university applications the Enterprise Computing department (the department that I work for at the university) is in charge of.

my.utep.edu has over 4,571,332 users per year.
The Process
  • Understanding
  • Define
  • Ideate
  • Test

Understanding the problem

We conducted research interviews with our primary users (the students) to find any pain points that were experiencing with the existing application. 
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The research covered the following:

Also, we went ahead and interviewed 15 staff working on 7 different computer labs around the university campus to find out what are the most frequently asked questions by students.

Gathering Insights

After conducting the interviews we analyzed the data by grouping all the insights.

Personas

 The My.UTEP.edu app is used by three different student personas:

  • Newly Admitted Student
  • International Student
  • Graduate Student
Prioritize Issues

The problems were categorized in the following severity scale.
According to Nielsen Norman Group, we can categorize usability issues based on five severity levels:
NNgroup Prioritize UX Findings by Severity

  • High
  • Medium
  • Low
  • Bug
  • Good
Issues Found

Based on the user interviews conducted with 30 users, we found the following High priority issues:

  • Printing Services
  • Homepage Button
  • Homepage Scroll Down
  • Direct Deposit Module
  • Tutorials
1. Printing Services

Issue Found

  • 58% of users did not know how to add print credits, where to view their print credit balance, and how to use mobile printing.
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    At the time the research was done, users needed to click on the Miner Gold Card icon to view their print credit balance and to add more print credits. After talking with the students, we realized that they did not connect the icon with printing services.

Possible Solution

  • Add a new module on the dashboard for printing services with “Printer Locations”, “Mobile Printing”, “How to add print credits”, “Printing Services”, and “Add Print Credits” links.
2. Homepage Button

Issue Found

  • 62% of users were having trouble returning to the my.utep.edu homepage. They did not know that clicking on the MY UTEP logo will take them back to the homepage.

Possible Solution

  • Add a menu icon option to take them back to the Homepage.
3. Homepage Scroll Down

Issue Found

  • 29% of users did not know that there was more content on the homepage after the links categories while using the desktop version.

Possible Solution

  • Add an arrow with movement to let the user know there is more information. Also, expand the white background to the bottom of the page.
4. Direct Deposit Module

Issue Found

  • 29% of users were having trouble finding where to setup the direct deposit.

Possible Solution

  • Add a bigger text for “Direct Deposit” and an icon to the existing direct deposit module.
5. Tutorials

Issue Found

  • 29% of users requested to add different tutorials one of the most mentioned was "How to get a new degree evaluation".

    To generate a degree evaluation the students need to use the Banner Student Information System which is complex and not user friendly.

Possible Solution

  • Add a new tab on the MY UTEP student portal for tutorials and include the "How to get a new degree evealuation" tutorial.
Validate Possible Solutions

To test the possible solutions, we decided to conduct an in-person usability test by creating a mobile and desktop prototype with the possible solutions using InVision app.

The test was conducted with 15 students, 5 of each persona.

We captured each participant’s navigational choices, task completion rates, and comments.

During the sessions it was observed that all the possible solutions worked. The students completed the tasks without any issues.

Below are some of the tasks the students where asked to complete:

1.    Printing Services (Issue on both mobile and desktop)

  • Task:
    Pretend you don't have enough funds to print, where would you go to add funds?
  • Result:
    Students did not have any problems finding the “Printing Services” module on the dashboard.

2.    Homepage Button (Issue on both mobile and desktop)

  • Task:
    Show me where would you go to see your GPA? (GPA is located at the homepage)
  • Result:
    Students were able to return to the homepage using the new “Homepage” icon successfully. .
Develop Designs

After I tested the solutions and they worked. I added them to the MY UTEP high fidelity prototypes on InVision app so the web developers’ team and QA team can access to them and see all the specs.

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