Western International University
I was tasked with the fun challenge of improving the interface for the student online courses. The redesign would initially be limited to the constraints within the Learning Management System (LMS) until we found a more flexible platform. I gathered qualitative feedback in user testing with students on campus to understand how they use the interface every day.
"Chevy is a true UI/UX expert. He is creative and perceptive, easily translating user needs into a workable design/implementation. He is disciplined, driven, and overall a great teammate and pleasure to work with." - Jaime Baldwin, IT Solution ArchitectWestern International University Apollo Education Group
Challenges:
- Designs and location of some web components and elements that were controlled by the LMS provider.
- Course content navigation was limited to a particular section of the web page.
- The instructors were in charge of creating their own course content with a very basic text editor. They also had no experience with HTML. This limited my influence over the design at scale.
- During the months of prototyping, I had to wear the front-end developer hat on top of being the only UX designer.
The Course Home page
Before
Before
Before
With the design shown below, students were overwhelmed by the many links and navigation on the "Course Welcome" page. The design was not only outdated, but the typography also made it challenging to compartmentalize the content and distinguish section headings.
After
Before
Before
- Information hierarchy simplified by making the Class Description and main call-to-action be the focus (Go To Class). It could also be beneficial to have a short engaging video summarizing the course - almost like a movie trailer.
- Tabular navigation for the other important content that assists students in completing course objectives.
- Keeping the left side navigation bar collapsed by default to let the user's eyes focus on the page content.
Content Layout
Before
Before
Before
Below is a screenshot of what the course intro page looked like as you navigate the weekly content.
- They had sub-navigation within sub-navigation in the sidebar. This was not a good idea since they had about 8 weeks of content. This way of showing the information hierarchy can cause more needless cognitive load for the student trying to traverse the class content.
- The head of the curriculum wanted to re-organize the content, consolidate the Knowledge Check (quizzes) into one practice quiz before the students take the weekly final test.
After
Before
Before
After having some clarifying discussions with the deans, I realize that none of my thumbnails and wireframes made it obvious to the students needed to start their online discussions earlier in the week. The instructors wanted the discussions and readings to happen first. So I iterated the design.