MySCAD Portal Redesign
Student Team Project
Year
2023
Duration
10 weeks
Overview
Every day, hundreds of SCAD students rely on the MySCAD portal to access essential student resources and applications. Despite its importance, the portal is infamous for its frustrating organization and lack of curated content.
Our team sought to redesign the Desktop portal by conducting rounds of standardized user testing, to identify key issues and redesign high-severity tasks and workflows.
My Roles
UI Design Lead: I established our design system, led feedback sessions, and worked with our visual design lead to balance between data-driven functionality and visual craft.
User Testing Manager/Archivist: I created templates to capture and review data from heuristic evaluations and usability tests, converting key findings into artifacts and visuals.
Redesign Outcomes
36% Increase
In average task completion rate (53% to 89%).
165% Increase
In average system usability score (33 to 89).
Honorable Mention
At the International Design Awards.
Gallery
Less Cluttered, More Creative
Introducing a brand new visual overhaul, MySCAD finally looks like a platform used by design students.
Refreshed visual design
By completely overhauling MySCAD's interface, we modernized the portal's look and feel while improving functionality through data-driven changes.
Discovery
Heavily Used, Heavily Neglected
Everything a SCAD student might need
MySCAD is the hub for every relevant link a SCAD student may need to interact with. From course registrations to finding student deals, there’s a massive amount of information accessible to students.
A good old site audit
These early stages were important for taking inventory of everything the portal has to offer, from the most used links, to features we didn't even know existed.
Prioritizing our redesign goals
It was glaringly obvious that this redesign project was going to be more than a visual facelift. With dozens of different jobs to be done, we reached out to students to identify the most frequent tasks to build our testing plan.
User Testing
Testing The Existing System
Building our user tests
We established clear objectives for our user tests to ensure that we were gathering actionable insights into user behaviors, frustrations, and high severity issues.
The tests, and the (poor) results
All 6 of our students went through the same 30 minute user test, where we asked them to complete specific tasks and locate links across mySCAD. The results were below average, and it showed that we had our work cut out for us.
Observed behaviors
The bottom line was that even seniors struggled to find links across the website, even ones that were frequently visited. This highlights the outdated navigation pattern and the difficulty students had looking through walls of links.
Design
Revolutionizing MySCAD
Style guide
Compared to the rest of SCAD's student-facing websites, MySCAD looked old—really old. I combined SCAD's vibrant marketing touch points alongside modern dashboard UI references (thanks Cosmos) to create a cohesive mood board.
Addressing key issues
We started with crazy-8 sessions to sketch primary screens and interactions. From these sketches, I led our team to mid-fi & high fi-screens screens, refining our information architecture and copywriting and ensuring our changes aligned with user data.
Getting the simple wins
Search bar. From the bottom of the page to the top. Sometimes it's all about the little things.
Introducing quick links
From the depths of the resources page, I moved quick links to a new permanent home at the bottom of the side navigation. This change allowed for adding your own custom links as well, making it always easy to access links they used the most.
Visual refresh
With a completely new design system, MySCAD began to look like it could actually be fun to use.
Bringing emphasis to what matters most
Guided by our style guide and feedback, I transformed areas of MySCAD into more functionally and visually enhanced experiences. Here's an example:
OLD DESIGN
Just another list of links
I looked at a new design approach to make sure students never miss a discount again.
Additionally, some links went to websites, others downloaded brochures, but there was no visible affordance to distinguish this.
New Design
From confusion to clarity
I introduced the company logos for quicker recognition, and added buttons with clear labels and iconography so students knew exactly what they were getting into.
Personalize your home page
The new home page surfaces key information from other links across the website, and allows for students to set custom widgets to curate their MySCAD experience.
Validation
Testing Our Redesign
Final validation
Sure, the new screens look pretty, but did we solve the core issues that the existing portal had? Yes, yes we did.
A big win for students across campus
These results were overwhelmingly positive and showed our redesign was effective! Students loved the updated visuals— and asked when the launch date was.
Reflection
Key Learnings
What Did I Learn?
Good documentation saves a lot of headache
Keeping tidy files, testing notes, and a well structured calendar helped the team stay organized through every step of the project.
Don't feel like you have to solve everything
With only 10 weeks to research, test, design, and refine, we felt overwhelmed by the number of issues we uncovered within MySCAD. We learned to prioritize the most impactful problems, understanding that solving key issues first leads to meaningful progress, even if some problems are left for later.
Thanks for Reading!
Check out more of my projects, or reach out if you want to learn more about this one!
