Portal Widgets
Creating an all in one campus mobile experience
Client:
Product:
Mobile Application
Role:
UX / UI Designer
Date:
2022 - Present
Ready Education enables institutions to build and engage their campus community, improving communications and experiences that drive student success. Ready Education Acquired CampusGroups from Novalsys Inc in May 2022.
Add widgets to the desktop homepage and dashboard of the mobile app to show a users campus calendar, emails, and class data. Creating this dashboard will encourage students to continue to use the app daily and ensure that it is a part of their day to da routine on campus. This should be a one stop shop dashboard for their academic experience.
Fig. 1 Shows a mix of developer prototypes and my design prototypes. A mobile devleoper and I were tasked both with creating this solution in an effort to have something to show to key stakeholders. We are currently in progress of merging these two designs to ensure one coheisive vision across the team.
Our team started planning this product update at the end of 2021 while we were working with an agency, Digital Amo, to develop a new design system. Digital Amo produced low-fidelity wireframes that were used by our developer to begin development on the feature. Unfortunately, Digital Amo was not able to see the project to completion so we paused the project until Sept 2022.
At this point I was brought into the project after our developer had begun the development of the desktop view. My role was to create solutions to show these widgets in our mobile app.
Fig. 2 Side by side view of the desktop hompage and the final design for the mobile app homepage.
Approach
The CampusGroups product doesn’t have an equivalent of the “Desktop Homepage” within the mobile app so we had to analyze where these widgets might fit into the existing mobile app. I conducted competitive analysis research to see how our competitors created student dashboards before creating wireframes. In the competitive analysis I found that our competitors were often showing a webview or deep linking into a second app. This causes the user to have multiple apps downloaded in order to properly use their portal pages. This experience is clunky and adds frustration to the user trying to access their data.
Fig. 3 Shows the first widgets I proposed adding into the mobile app. These were not selected due to their size and it would require users to scroll too much to see the information they were looking for. This style also didn't fit into the design system created by Digital Amo.
The solution we decided upon was to create a homepage dashboard in the mobile app. In order to do this we will be sunsetting our “Discover” page feature and merging those widgets directly into the feed and the homepage while host the portal widgets for all of the academic integrations.
I created an announcements section to allow administrators to post key information and links to the top fo the homepage. We also added a bookmarks tab that allows the user to bookmark their favorite pages for quick and easy access. This is helpful for students who are officers of groups or who attend regular events they may way to have quick access too from the homepage. The final piece of this design is the calendar and courses widgets. Each widget allows the user to select the calendar event or course and quickly access more information.
Fig. 4 Shows the final widgets that I worked on to create the new student homepage in the mobile app.
Impact
Campuses are always looking for ways to create a one stop shop experience for their students. Our most asked for improvements revolve around minimizing the number of apps a campus has to use. With integrating to campus learning management systems we are able to pull in class data and allow users to eliminate yet another app from their device.
This project will wrap up in Q3 of 2023 after we roll out our iOS React Native mobile app to all 110 dedicated campus apps we support. As of January 2023 we have begun integrations with the learning management systems and we learned that we are able to access more data than we previously anticipated. Next we will work on pulling this data into our system and we will display courses on our group page along with calendar data within our events page. This will eliminate the need to deep link to a second app or show a web-view of another system.