Better MyStevens

Project Overview

Technologies Used:

Figma

React

CSS

JavaScript

Role: UX/UI Designer & Full-Stack Developer

Timeline: February 2025 - May 2025

Student-researched redesigned student portal focused on improving user efficiency from the current student portal, Workday. This was a semester-long project for Human Computer Interaction (CS 545), which included low, medium and our last iteration, the high fidelity prototype that included student-backed data via Jakob Nielsen's Heuristic Evaluation list to measure efficiency, brand authenticity, and prototype functionality.

Design & Development Process

As a collective of three, we identified that our primary E (effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn) is efficient. We chose to revise our student portal for two reasons:

• Ease of access to the target audience in a campus setting
• The product aimed to revise is notoriously known to be difficult and unintuitive

We began collecting data from a local community college and identified that:

• Our current portal takes 3 more clicks for the semester statement
• Our current portal takes 4 more clicks for the course catalog

Moreover, we decided on Jakob Nielsen's Heuristic Evaluation with designated tasks for our users to compare and contrast our proposed revision and our current student portal, including:

• Accessing their course schedule
• Searching/filtering courses to take for next semester
• Viewing financial information
• Viewing Grades
• Viewing the campus resources directory (our MyStevens integration)

Results & Learning

We surveyed 5 students from our campus to measure efficiency as well as how they felt with their user experience with our high fidelity prototype and how their experience compares with the current student portal. The overall results are as follows:

• 100% of users could see themselves enjoying the prototype over the current portal, with 40% agreeing and 60% strongly agreeing
• 100% of users found that the our buttons were well integrated, with 20% agreeing and 80% strongly agreeing
• 80% of users disagreed that the prototype was not accommodating enough for both advanced users and inexperienced users
• All users indicated a reduction in the number of clicks and time to navigate on each designated task, showing up to a 60% reduction of average clicks

Based on our feedback, we developed our high fidelity prototype via React and Tailwind CSS, to which I systematically refactored the React codebase to match our Figma specifications and fixed styling inconsistencies.