INTERACTION DESIGNER / PRODUCT DESIGNER
Sheridan International Application System
UI/UX Design, Visual Design, User Research
An efficient application system for international students who want to apply for Sheridan College
ROLE
Project Manager
Visual Design
UI/UX Design
User Research
Animation
TOOLS
Adobe Illustrator
InVision
COLLABORATORS
Yueru(Christine) Wu, Xuefei(Fay) Lin, Jeremy Hung
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Sheridan International Centre wants to develop their application system for international students who are unfamiliar with the application process. The goal of this project is to enhance the user experience of the international application system, also to increase the efficiency and usability for the users.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Sheridan College requires a better online system of recruiting and enrolling international students. In 2017, the college received 13,564 non-unique applications for this September intake. In a calendar year, this number exceeds 25,000 applications from more than 100 countries.
PREVIOUS VERSION
FINAL DEVELOPED SYSTEM
How might we create an efficient application system for those international students who plan to apply for Sheridan College?
CHALLENGE
PROJECT PROCESS OVERVIEW
Gathering valuable data
Persona
Behavioral Mapping
Context scenario
Design requirement
Flowchart
Wireframe
​
Prototype
Reflection
Develop
Learning
RESEARCH
Target Users
Before we redesign the system, the first and most important thing is to understand the users, what do they think toward the original system, what are the pain points when they are using this system. We used interview and survey as the way to gather valuable data. We found out that English proficiency is the biggest barrier for most of the international students, and some of them choose to hire an agent to do the application. Also, during the interview, many students reflect that some of the words or choices are ambiguous, which is hard for them to answer or choose.
Original System
In order to develop the system, we also need to get to know the existing problems of the original one, so my teammates and I went through the entire application process by using the original system and then conducted a problem statement.
Problem Statement
We noticed that the international application system of Sheridan College doesn’t have a clear navigation, also there are some errors pop out during the application progress. Because different programs have different requirements, and the users may feel confused about the term or other important things that they need to know, which is hard for a new user to fill the information correctly. Also. Some users may not know that there is a timer for the application system. Last but not least, the design of the interface makes users feel uncomfortable, which provides a bad user experience.
VISUALIZING DATA
Persona & Behavioral Map
According to the data that we gathered from our research, we created four personas (3 student type and 1 agent type) and also their behavioral map. Meanwhile, we did a short analysis for each of the personas which depends on their survey and interview responses.
IDEATION & CONCEPT
Context Scenario & Design Requirement
After we finished visualize the data, we moved on to develop the context scenarios and the design requirements which depends on the context scenarios. There are three main aspects being included in design requirements, which are the functional requirement, data requirement, and contextual requirement. We listed all the necessary elements needed for the system down, and as a team, we went through all the content again and refined them.
Flowchart
All the needed elements are finalized, then we moved to work on the flowchart, which is used to show the complete application process, and also helped us to finalize all the needed pages.
Input Method
Users need to click any buttons to trigger the interaction, such as submit their information.
The user needs to complete all the required questions for the current step to proceed to the next step.
All the explanations are clear on the system, users can follow the instruction on the page step by step to finish there application.
Wireframe
Depending on all the stuff we did in the previous sections, we sketched out the draft of wireframe, then we used Illustrator to cover those sketched to the low-fidelity grey wireframes, which is used to be the guideline and template for us to make the prototype.
GREY WIREFRAME
PROTOTYPING
Prototype
EVALUATION
Reflection & Learning
This project is one of the projects which ask me to create a system from the beginning (User Research) to the end (Final animated prototype). I got the change to make a system which has a better user experience and make their life easier. This is also the first time for me to conduct the context scenario and design requirement, which makes realize how useful and helpful of those two elements are for me to design a better product and provide a better user experience.