2022, 3 Weeks
User Interviews, Personas, User Flows, Design Studio, Sketching, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Presentation
The School of Systems Engineering
User Interviews, User Flows, Sketches & Low-Fi prototyping.
SOSE came to us to help them design an online tool that would help users involved in their 10 week final year projects to collaborate.
Our solution, V-Labs is the product of extensive user research, design, iteration and usability testing. The final platform contained features to tackle the main pain points we identified in our user interviews, which have been through 2 rounds of usability testing.
To define a web-based tool that will help all the users involved in industry projects to collaborate effectively.
They focus on connecting final year STEM students with real industry briefs for their thesis. SOSE also facilitate the projects by providing supervisors for the student groups throughout the 10 week process.
75% of users don’t know who SOSE are...
Through our 8 interviews (4 students, 2 academics and 2 supervisors) it became clear that hardly anyone had heard of SOSE, or knew what Systems Engineering is.
We also found that:
Students found a lack of guidance at the beginning of projects, to help them get up to speed before beginning the 10 week process
Communication was lacking a coherent method, being split across many platforms
Supervisors found themselves repeating information constantly
Some students were more involved than others, creating an unequal workload despite this being a group project. They were also worried about plagiarism
Supervisors & students have a 1hr meeting each week to discuss progress or pain points in the projects. These meetings are not being effectively utilised.
I summarised this further into the below diagram to help us guide our thinking into the ideation phase.
Our Research highlighted an onboarding process was needed, but it also showed that the need for the platform itself was more pressing.
So, we focused on defining the look and function of the platform for our ideation.
It was clear from the research that some students too a more active role in the projects, so we needed a new persona.
Meet Terry our student leader, this addition brings accountability to the projects, to solve collaboration, organisation and communication pain points.
“Terry needs a way to effectively collaborate with his team, so that he can ensure he is on track to meet deadlines efficiently.”
Design Studio with the client
Following our research findings, we refined our personas and ran a design studio with SOSE to ideate on the below HMW
HMW streamline the project process and better engage students, while helping them with organisation and collaboration?
From our Design Studio the below features aligned most effectively with the pain points discovered in our research:
1. Visual dashboard highlighting the students progress through the course
2. Integration of systems engineering framework through use of the roadmap
3. Feedback section
4. Tasks and Actions
5. Chat
6. Calendar overview
7. Resources area
We re-focused with our problem statement front of mind & decided to build out the Tasks and Actions features.
Other features we came up with in the Design Studio were still important, but with a time constraint we couldn’t focus on them all.
Why Tasks and Actions?
These features solve the main pain points from our research of collaboration, communication and organisation.
They also most effectively solve our problem statement, which focuses on helping the students collaborate.
Simplicity was key to ensuring that students adopted the platform for use during their projects.
We iterated on our design studio sketches & I created an initial layout for our visual dashboard, which would serve as the landing page for our users.
Students were not bothered by the Systems Engineering ways of thinking, despite this being SOSE main framework for the projects
However students weren’t aware they were already following SE frameworks through use of the existing project timeline.
Using this timeline offered a simple & non-obtrusive solution that would be easy for students to follow, plus it aligned with SOSE business goals.
An introduction to the platform was needed to ensure users were clear about the each features functionality
Users couldn’t tell the difference between Tasks and Actions with some saying “surely they are the same thing?”.
As this was our key to solving our problem statement we really needed to address it!
I came up with the solution of adding a 6 step tutorial, that would guide users through the features of the platform before they landed on the dashboard.
Another round of testing & our users were still confused at our terminology...
“I understand the need for the tutorial but the copy and names of these two features don’t make sense”
Ana, User in round 2 of testing.
“There is no suggestion of hierarchy between tasks and actions, surely they’re the same thing?”
Sophie, User in round 2 of testing.
HMW make the terms clearer to first time users?
We brainstormed on words similar to Tasks and Actions, eventually settling on “Team Goals” and “My Actions” to help establish hierarchy.
We surveyed our testers again and 19/23 agreed that this change established more hierarchy & they understood the terms more clearly.
If we had more time, we would run another round of testing with new users to further test the feature names.
After testing, we made several amends to visual hierarchy & took the entire prototype from low to high fidelity.
Iteration 2: Visual hierarchy made if difficult for users to understand which was the correct button to click. We simplified the screen, adding more clear CTAs.
Iteration 3: Users were confused by which section to click for creating an action or completing an action.So, we added clear CTA’s and ensured the journey of marking an action as complete was more obvious.
Visual Dashboard was a success, we kept a muted colour palette to avoid distractions.
“There is a useful visualisation of all the elements on the homepage”
Ana, User in round 2 of testing.
Introducing a coherent visual identity for the platform was important to help with feature definition
My team mate Tom suggested that keeping the colour palette paired back would highlight key information & ensure users don’t get overwhelmed.
However, I was concerned with one piece of our user feedback from low fi testing, which said: “I thought all the grey bits were disabled so I couldn’t click them”.
We agreed some colour coding was needed to help differentiate the features on the platform.
Tom has an extensive background in branding which we were very fortunate to have and he came up with our brand identity.
The name V-Labs also takes the brand nicely back to its roots in Systems Engineering, which follows a process called the V Lifecycle.
Summarising a complex problem and solution in a 20minute presentation was not easy!
My focus for the presentation was introducing the client, the industry context and summarising what our brief required us to solve.
This was crucial to ensure that all those listening with no Systems Engineering experience could understand the process and complex terms we were using throughout.
“I am thoroughly impressed by their results!”
Considering we were starting from scratch, we managed to create an entire brand and visual identity for a very complex learning support system.
Plus also identified other areas that SOSE need to explore to take the platform live.
Answering the Brief with our features
Earlier, I summarised the opportunity that faced SOSE and the pain points that our solution needed to address through the below diagram.
Through research & testing, we achieved an end platform which has features to address each of these pain points.
What I have Learnt....
When we first received the brief, I was overwhelmed as it was such a complex problem we were trying to unpick. Not just in terms of what SOSE wanted, but also getting our heads around what Systems Engineering is took a while!
If I could do this again, I would ensure we had a more concrete plan and structure to our discussions as a team. We spent a long time discussing the pain points and many possible solutions (at the sketching stage), but putting pen to paper took a while and could have saved time had we done it sooner.
I also learnt a lot about playing to team members strengths and using these to our advantage to get the most out of the project.
Please feel free to explore my work, or get in touch to have a chat!
