University Of East Bengal

Simul Sarker

Project Overview
The Product
University of East Bengal is a fictional online IT university. Their online learning platform will have a realistic university in-campus experience, to invite students to feel engaged with the curriculum.
Project duration
September 2021 - December 2021
Problem
  • It’s boring and life-less in some cases, as almost all learning platforms use recored video-classes.
  • Students can’t ask questions to the teacher live.
  • It’s innovative to provide a new real life class experience to online student.
The Product
Design a learning platform for University Of East Bengal that gives the user real life univesity experience.
My Role
UX designer designing E-learning platform for University of East Bengal from scratch to prototype.
Responsibility
Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.
Process
I follow a design thinking approach to structure the process. Design thinking is a creative process to understand the users, challenge assumptions, redefine the problems and create innovative solutions by prototype development and tests that involve 5 phases.

User Research

During the empathize phase the main goal is to answer these 3 core questions:
Who?
Who is the user of EB university?
  • Students who want to pursue a career in IT sectors.
Where?
Where the service will be provided?
Mobile, tablet or desktop?
  • Full online
  • To learn IT subjects user must have desktop browser.
What?
What makes EB university stand out among other learning platforms?
  • Engaging community features
  • Live virtual classes for new experience
  • Long-term learning system

Competitive Analysis

Here, none of the platforms assessed is our direct competitor, but we can still analyse how the most popular learning platforms are delivering their learning experience.

Persona

Empathy Map

I conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the users I’m
designing for and their needs. A primary user group identified through research
was students who want to learn modern IT subjects.

Pain Points

1
Learning Alone
Students want to have an experience as fun and engaging as traditional school or college can be.
2
Live Interactions
Students often need to ask questions or get stuck in small problems. Here, communication and interaction with teachers or senior students is key to go up the learning curve.
3
Networking
Traditional online learning platforms don’t have any good networking opportunities like in real-life education institutes.

Storyboard

User Flow

What user should be able to do?
  • Join online classes
  • Interact with other students and with teachers
  • Having an experience more similar to real-life campus

Paper wireframe

Before jumping to the low-fidelity wireframe design, I did the main brainstorm on paper to have a first visual idea of the project.

Digital wireframes

Low-fidelity prototype

The low-fidelity prototype shows the primary user flow, serving as a basic guide for the user to join online classes. With this prototype I did my initial user testing and collected the feeback.
View LF Prototype

Usability study: findings

When I conducted the usability study for the University of East Bengal, users said the flow was great, but they face some problems while they try to do some tasks. They left me some feedback that I can work on.
Round 1 findings
  • Got confused with the live class, namely where ask questions to the teacher
  • Search feature was missing in the campus page.
Round 2 findings
  • Right-top profile icon contains a missing link to the user.
  • Some users want to see the upcomming class schedules with calendar view.

Refining The Design

On our first round I found the user struggled to ask questions to the teacher, so for a better usability I brought icons to make the page more intuitive.
The users want a search feature on the campus page, to search for old campus posts, for example.
On our second round findings the user also mentioned the need to learn about upcoming classes, their schedule as calendar view, or details about the syllabus.

System Design

Mockups

High-fidelity Prototype

Using the completed set of digital wireframes, I created a high-fidelity prototype, showing the primary user flow for a great learning experience. This prototype can be used in the usability study.
View HF Prototype

Accessibility considerations

1
Make  the navigation bar easy to use.
2
Filter and search helps the user to find information according to their needs.
3
Accessible colors and fonts, icons are designed on system design

Going Forward

Impact
When I did the usability study, all of the users were feeling excited about this concept of learning experience. They mentioned that it feels like siting in a class room with friends.
They were excited to see it live.
What I learned
While I was doing the research, I got many other ideas from the users that really help me to think differently, how to combine the best of online platform, with the engaging feeling of a physical campus.

Next steps

1
My next plan is working for the teachers’ dashboard, because besides students, teachers will play a major role to make this university project successful.
2
Conduct more user research to determine any new areas of need.
Thank you for your time reviewing my University of East Bengal platform!

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