Aplia Student Home Page
Project Overview: This is the home page for the students after they sign in to Aplia.com. The current design was built more than 3 years ago.
Goal: To improve efficiency addressing major user goals and clean up unnecessary elements on the page, to update the design visually
My Role: User experience designer
Company: Aplia
Year: September 2009 – December 2009
Discovery – Understanding Users Needs
We conducted student and instructor interview. For students, we did phone interview and we also went to a local college to meet with students face to face. Mainly, we wanted to know what the students want to do when they sign in to Aplia.com?
These are the summary of the findings:
- Do homework
- Don’t want to miss homework
- Want to see what is coming up
- Check their scores
- How did I do last week?
- To prepare for my exam, what topics I didn’t do well?
Design
Understanding what the students want to do, the focus was to clearly display assignments in the home page. The biggest change made was to remove the entire assignments tab because if the students can access their assignments from the home page, there is no need to have it as a separate tab. Scores tab was also moved as the 2nd tab next to home tab to make it more prominent.
Quick usability validation
For this project, we had a luxury of time to perform quick usability student on the clickthrough prototype (made with Fireworks). 5 students were tested and there were minor changes made as a result of the test findings. We also plan to do future student interview after they have used it for a few months.
What have I learned?
It is important to push ourselves and try hard for the ideal solutions but it is more important to know when to stop when things didn’t work as planned, otherwise we could be losing much more time than what we should be spending. In this case, the engineer and me tried to make/design a “hack” drop down menu to display reading table of content but we couldn’t get the functionality works the way we want (mainly issues with browser compatibility and scrollbar). After spending quite a bit of time of this small feature, we decided to go with a simpler dialog solution.
Table of contents original design
Table of contents new design
Disclaimer: This is only a brief look of my work. This project is owned by Aplia and I only want to show a few sample materials. For more details on particular projects, feel free to contact me at chatreez [at] gmail [dot] com.