Updating an Experience
Updating and modernizing SLU Workforce Center’s Student website and portal.
The Project & Problem
SLU’s Workforce website, course catalogue, and student system were built on an antiquated system that was hard to use both for the students and the staff who had to maintain the course catalogue and student coarse purchases. The Intelligence Factory (TIF) was brought in to build a new sleek the system for database management and interface. TIF, whom I had worked with previously, brought me in to consult and revamp the customer experience for the website and course system. This involved meeting and brainstorming with the client to get ideas and business requirements, providing user flows, updated navigation, creating new experiences in wireframe form, passing those wireframes to a design team in India, managing and critiquing work from the design team, and taking ownership of the design assets when the India team was no longer engaged.
Orginal Site
The original SLU Workforce site was built on an antiquated system provided by the schools course database vendor. It offered little customization or coherent styling. These experience for finding and purchasing courses, managing profiles, and general navigability was clunky and confusing. The back-end experience for the faculty and staff running and maintaining the Workforce program & databases was even worse.
Rethinking user paths and navigation
The first step was to discover user paths and improve current processes. Also the original navigation, through the years, had gather a lot of orphaned subjects and oddly categories.
Low-Fi wireframe experimentation to High Fidelity
I began with extremely low-fi - mid-fi wire ideas to review and work through with the client. Once we had agreed to chosen layout we passed those low to mid-fi wires to a design team in India who, using a purchased template system, transformed them into full fledged designs from which we further refined the experience
Managing overseas talent
While the offshore design team was engaged I provide daily critiques of design and reviewed finished designs with our client before signing off that an assets was done. Eventually the offshore became too expensive, so I took over the design creation which involved updating some minor as well as major tweaks and creating a lot of the mobile and tablet layouts.
