The adoption of online programs by universities has increased the ability of full-time workers to return to school to further their education. However, these students must cope with adding their courses to schedules already filled with work and family obligations. A Learning Management System (LMS) that is confusing and difficult to navigate may make students decide that furthering their education is beyond them.

How it started:

While I was attending online university courses, I noted a series of complaints from students during virtual class meetings and in external student forums. The students stated that that a confusing LMS interface and lack of functionality was negatively impacting their studies, and made engaging with the course materials frustrating. One student who left the program cited frustration with the platform as being a major contributing factor.

Challenge:

I needed to determine where the students were encountering difficulty accessing and interacting with their learning materials. Then, I needed to produce recommendations to reduce the time and effort necessary access their course materials and make studying less frustrating.

Solution:

I produced a video presentation and accompanying document outlining a series of change recommendations to improve students' ability to navigate the LMS and engage with learning materials. I also produced a prototype of a redesign that incorporated the suggestions. User testing on the original design and the prototype demonstrated an 81.1% reduction in task completion time over a series of 6 crucial tasks.

The Project:

Client: Falmouth University

Discovery:

Surveys

Interviews

In order to develop proper personas and an understanding of user pain points, I performed a series of 5 remote user interviews over Teams. All participants were current students of the university, completing an online post-graduate degree.

The interview was divided into three portions. In the first portion, participants were asked about external life factors that affected their studies such as family, employment status, and location of study. In the second portion, they were asked about their study habits and how they used the platform. In the third portion, they were asked open ended questions about which activities they found difficult to perform and which they would consider pleasant/easy.

Results:

Personas

When I reviewed the data set of my surveys and interviews to develop a picture of the product’s users, the results were similar enough to suggest a single primary persona rather than multiple personas. In addition, a I performed a journal review of studies of student satisfaction in online education to further inform my persona design.

I determined that the primary persona suggested by the data is an adult learner returning to school to continue their education. They have adult responsibilities such as full-time jobs and families which put major requirements on their time. Therefore, they need a system which is intuitive and allows them to focus on their coursework rather than spending time trying to find their course materials or figure out how to communicate with their instructor or fellow students. My assessment is backed up by a 2019 Lipman Heard study that found that most adult learners are employed full-time and live in suburbs or cities, and that more than half are married and/or have families.

User Journeys

In order to develop a more coherent idea of each user's experience, I created three user journey maps using my persona, Teri, as the typical user. I based the flow for each map on the most important flows as determined from the surveys and interviews. I refined them to include further findings after I performed initial user testing on the existing system.

The activities were:

1. The most common activity the students performed: accessing and interacting with courses

2. The activity that received the lowest satisfaction score: communicating with instructors and peers

3. The activity that the students felt was the most important activity that they participated in: turning in projects for grading

The pain points indicated by these flows include the following:

Journey #1

• There is a redundant step during course access requiring students to select the week and then be sent to a page with all the weeks available.

• Students lacked a way to navigate to a non-sequential lesson without exiting to the main menu.

Journey #2

• Students lacked the ability to contact an instructor or fellow student without navigating away from coursework.

Journey #3

• Accessing assignments required opening a hidden navigation bar with no labeling.

• Students were confused because the button to access the file browser to turn in project files was labeled "Start Assignment".

Ideation

Wireframes

Using Figma, I created low-fidelity wireframes. I performed tests using fellow students in the program based on the series of tasks I created for the initial user test of the existing platform. I noted and made the following changes for my high-fidelity prototype.

• The users found the sliding tab system interesting but too far outside their expectations for comfort.

• More explicit labeling for course navigation was needed

Testing

Usability Testing

I created my high-fidelity prototype using Adobe XD. For the first round of testing, I recruited 8 users in two groups of 4. Group 1, like my existing platform test, consisted of users who had experience attended online university programs that used a different platform. Group 2 consisted of students who were studying or had studied using the Falmouth University Canvas platform.

I made two rounds of iterations, performing user testing with similar test groups after each and making adjustments based on my findings each time.

Changes from First to Final prototype

Outcome

Recommendation Document

The purpose of the project was to generate a recommendation document of areas to improve in order to reduce student frustration and improve both satisfaction and learner out come. I produced the recommendations in the form of a document and an accompanying walk-through presentation video. My summarized recommendations were:

1. Overall site simplification and “cleaning” to reduce visual confusion

2. Add linking functionality so students can access the Falmouth library and student services from within the LMS.

3. Clarify and simplify course navigation

4. Add bookmarking functionality so students can save courses and reading materials for future/continued use

5. Add navigation functions for key actions, prioritize:

   1. Methods to contact the instructor(s)

   2. Additional and clearly labeled ways to join weekly live sessions

   3. Clear and prioritized function to submit coursework for assessment

6. Remove all unclear naming conventions such as Big Blue Button and Talis Aspire and replace with clear descriptive titles to improve student wayfinding and navigation.

Prototype Results