MyPlan v.1.0
UW’s first online academic planner that won a $1M grant and a Campus Technology Innovator’s award
MyPlan helps students build an academic plan that guides them to complete their degree on time.
Client
University of Washington
My Role
UX research lead
UX design lead
Visual design lead
MyPlan is a one-stop academic planning tool for University of Washington students built with Kuali technology for the Kuali consortium.
Problem Overview
UW students have had difficulties in academic planning to complete their degree within their desired timeline. Finding & registering for the right courses requires multiple siloed tools and websites such as the UW course catalog, the quarterly time schedule, and the degree audit report. In short, academic planning and tracking has proven to be challenging, so MyPlan was conceived to help them to navigate the UW's curricular offerings to achieve their academic goals.
PROCESS
User Research & Synthesis
As a lead researcher, I planned a field study including user interviews and observations to understand users' needs & goals in their academic life. After 14 interviews and observations, we synthesized rich descriptions of academic challenges from students and academic advisers.
Interviewing students: registration plans as a Word file
Interviewing students: Academic plan in a notebook
Research findings:
Tracking accurate academic progress is important to make steady progress towards graduation, but the current degree audit reports are difficult to understand.
Students had to compile curricular information from multiple sources before making plans; department websites, UW resources & tools, peer recommendations, etc.
Students planned for one year or less in detail and had a high-level plan for longer terms. Too many uncertainties & variables in academic life for long-term planning.
Students had multiple short-term academic plans and revised them once or more per quarter.
Students wanted to validate their plans with advisers and peers. Yet, having a timely in-person meeting with an adviser before registration can be difficult.
An academic plan could be lists or tables on a paper planner, a notepad, or in spreadsheet. Half of interviewees had both paper and electronic versions.
Research findings not only enlightened us but also shook up our old assumptions about student behaviors. Furthermore, I also created the MyPlan persona set based on this research data. These were used in scenarios, task flows, and in many team discussions.
MyPlan’s Persona Posters
MyPlan’s persona, Susie
MyPlan’s persona, Jana
MyPlan’s persona, Frank
MyPlan’s persona, Gretchen
Design Solutions & Explorations
With the insights of student’s key tasks, goals, and pain points, we refined the vision of a new academic planning tool and started exploring solutions for key tasks.
Key user tasks to support:
Find a course to see its offering info and the course details.
View and evaluate course details; meeting time, credit, prerequisites, restrictions, instructor. etc.
Save courses of interest to the plan for both the short-term and long-term.
Add personal notes to the plan.
Track my progress toward degree completion.
Get feedback on the plan from my adviser
Early exploration in sketches
Finding the right courses to start building the plan
Students create a short-term plan—a list of degree requirement courses with a couple of general education requirement courses—each quarter. To support this key task, we aggregated the course data from multiple sources in MyPlan for students. They were empowered to find courses, evaluate the course details, and to add it to a plan without leaving the page.
Adding a course to the plan task flow
Course search UI in wireframe
Course details UI in wireframe
Updating the plan from the degree audit report
The UW Degree audit reporting system is the most important tool for tracking the academic progress for students and advisers. They run the audit to find the next step in the academic path, so incorporating it into MyPlan was the logical decision for us.
To support a cohesive academic planning flow, I also redesigned the audit report to be interactive and scannable; courses can be added directly to the plan and requirements are color-coded and grouped by degree, department, etc.
During the usability studies, participants expressed their delight with the new degree audit report.
Before redesign of the degree audit report
After redesign of audit report (truncated)
Prototype, Test, & Iterate
As a lead UXD, I systemized MyPlan’s usability study modeled after Krug’s ‘Rocket Surgery Made Easy.’ Our low-budget usability studies were conducted every 6-8 weeks and I facilitated nine of them in 2012 and 2013. Teammates participated in preparation, observation, and debriefing, so we were able to test and iterate the prototype rapidly.
Test every 6-8 weeks
MyPlan’s usability test setup in a meeting room
Study Session Technical Setup:
- Skype
- Interactive prototype or a Dev build in a QA environment
Visual Design under the UW Brand Guideline
The beauty of launching a beta product is creating a new identity. We worked together to define the MyPlan’s brand expression while incorporating the UW brand attributes and guidelines. Mood boards and style tiles were utilized for visual exploration. Final visual expression and editorial expression were documented in a brief style guide.
MyPlan’s visual style exploration with style tiles
Branded visual design applied to a course details page
OUTCOME
MyPlan v.1.0 Launch
MyPlan v.1.0 was released in October 2012 within 12 months of the project kickoff. Its initial adoption goal was exceeded to our surprise and has garnered positive feedback from UW students and advisers. By August 2013, 10,546 plans were built.
“I can show my registration plan to my friends and adviser super quick! ”
Awards
$1 million grant from the Gates Foundation
MyPlan won a $1 million grant with the vision of expanding this academic planner to all community college students in Washington state (2013).
Campus Technology Innovator’s award
MyPlan won the Student System & Services category (2014).
