Case Study: Student Information System (SIS)
my role: design lead, front end development
Overview/Background
Students and faculty at Tufts University depend on the Student Information System (SIS) for course scheduling and enrollment. User feedback informed us that these needs were not being adequately met. Students were not able to find or schedule classes they needed to graduate, and faculty were having courses cancelled because of poor enrollment figures. Our UX team partnered with the the SIS administrative team to address these issues and improve the usability of the system.
Research
Surveys, user and stakeholder interviews as well as ethnographic studies helped us identify key components for improvement: course search, class scheduling and the course enrollment process. Additionally we conducted a competitive analysis of similar registration systems from other universities. We discovered during our initial discussions that the back end system Tufts utilized, PeopleSoft, would make custom solutions difficult, but not impossible. We also knew that any proposed solution would need to work with future PeopleSoft updates.
Execution
Design and development were divided into 2 phases. Course search and enrollment were tackled first followed by the design of a calendar based scheduling component. We adopted an iterative user-centered design approach. This allowed us to engage and utilize feedback from both users and the development team during our design efforts. It also allowed us to continue user testing during development and revise the interface and interaction as necessary. Design was locked 8 weeks prior to launch to allow for development and testing.
Results
When we began the bar was pretty low. Many students frequently complained about how much they hated being dependant on SIS. The semester following launch we reached out to students and faculty to assess their experience with the improved system. Over 70% of respondents found the experience to be positive and a significant improvement. One student responded, “I LOVE it. I wish you had implemented this from the beginning. This is exactly how I wanted class search to work when I started using SIS two years ago.”
Visit the site: https://sis.uit.tufts.edu