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Product Overview
About the Product
The University of Florida is upgrading its IT systems to improve user experience, reduce redundancy, and boost functionality. As part of this, faculty and staff are transitioning to a modern enterprise suite. Quick Links replaces the old service portal with a streamlined, mobile-friendly interface integrated into one.uf, making it easier to access essential tools.
My Role
Lead UX designer on the one.uf team. Responsible for leading and facilitating user research, user testing, and user interface design, presenting design deliverables to stakeholders, and facilitating developer handoff to ensure a quality end product.
The Problem
After the University transitions to a new management suite, the former portal website-used by thousands of employees daily-will shut down, leaving no useful directory of work-related links. We were tasked with coming up with a modern, user-friendly replacement that integrates with the existing one.uf portal. <br><br>
Additionally, we were tasked with identifying pain points in the existing software, to find room for improvement with the new solution.
The Goal
Conceptualize, design, and test a new solution for the link directory that works equally well on desktop, tablet, and mobile environments. Create a solution that integrates with the existing one.uf self-service portal, perform user research and testing to improve the user experience based on pain points identified in the existing solution, and launch the new product alongside the old one before the switch occurs, to give users an easier transition period.
Design Process
To facilitate ideation and help the team start thinking about user research, user personas were created based on the functions of the portal and the types of university employees we knew were using it daily. Interviews were conducted with members of the UF faculty and staff to outline their usage of the current portal and gather pain points to try to solve with the new design. Based on feedback from these users, we identified that a layout of the links with clearly defined headings on a single page would be easier to navigate than the current, nested menu system with a confusing user interface. We also learned that many employees benefit from creating shortcuts to frequently used links on the old portal, which appear on the portal homepage.
Starting the Design
Finalizing the Design
After a few rounds of low-fidelity mockups, a high-fidelity prototype was created using our existing design system for one.uf. The screens were linked to simulate the experience of using the new links page and creating custom cards for the one.uf homepage.
For security and data reasons, I can't provide a link to the final product, but I have included screenshots that show the UI and a video of the final prototype used for developer handoff.
View the Final Product Live
Key Takeaways
This product is in active development and will be released soon. It will provide a convenient way for thousands of faculty and staff at the University of Florida to find the resources they need during the course of their jobs.
This project taught me a lot about empathizing with users in their own environments. We got to go and meet people in their workspaces to see how they interact with our products and talk to them first-hand about some of their pain points.
- Perform additional usability testing
- Consider expanding the availability Quick Links to students in the future
- Perform accessibility audits
- Perform accessibility-focused user testing
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