University portal
This higher education client moved their existing university portal from Drupal to Salesforce - Experience Cloud. The vision was not a lift & shift, but rather producing a collaborative, engaging environment for their students and faculty members.
Project overview
This higher education client has already purchased Salesforce and our Experience Cloud IP library. In this project, I discovered user problems regarding their current portal and designed a solution with little custom development for fast delivery.
The Problem
Students found it difficult to communicate with their classmates on projects outside of the classroom. They found it hard to find information through their current university portal. Also, site admins are doing a lot of manual work to keep their content relevant and useful for students.
What I did
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Stakeholder Interviews
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Heuristic Reviews
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Site Maps
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Wireframes
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High fidelity mockups
The Challenge
Consolidating and organizing all University information in a new portal for students while also making it intuitive, self-serving, and engaging. There was so much content that it was challenging to make it consumable and display content that provides the most value.
site map
When I created a site map for this client, the first step was to gather all the necessary information about their current portal structure and content. This included pages, sections, categories, and subcategories. Once this information has been collected, I facilitated a tree sorting exercise. From the findings, I created a future state site map with improved architecture.
wireframes
Designed wireframes using grayscale to focus on specific components and information that will presented on each page of the portal. I redlined components that we would utilize from IBM's Salesforce IP library.
Low Fidelity
Low Fidelity with Red Lines
high fidelity
After client's approval of wireframes and style guide, User Interface (UI) design was then applied for visual review. Below is a slide deck gallery of high fidelity mockups.
mobile design
Students and Professors are always on the go between classes, extra curricular activities, labs, etc. They are able to access the same information and actions via mobile device.
This design shows how components used in desktop are natively responsive to mobile devices.
Results
The new university portal was personalized students and professors based on their profile, onboarding, and preferences. Portal admins now have the ability to create groups where users can post and react to messages from classmates. In addition, all university news, events, and trending items are now can Since the portal is hosted on Salesforce, the client is now able to limit manual admin tasks and use out-of-the-box features like Einstein analytics.