Redesigning Dartmouth’s DartHub Student Info System
Why a Redesign
As a side project to prepare for the hackathon season, improve my design and prototyping skills, and procrastinate on studying for my midterm exams, I decided to challenge myself and redesign Dart Hub, Dartmouth’s web application that allows students to enroll in classes, look at grades, and conduct other school related tasks. Here’s the catch: I would have to go from research to a hi-fi prototype over 24 hours.
Why a redesign of Dart Hub? It seems like its a common pass time to complain about Dart Hub at Dartmouth. I wanted to understand why people found it so confusing and what I could do in order improve the experience of a resource that every student needs to use at Dartmouth.
I would like to do this redesign for 2 reasons:
- The design has too many options the moment you open the webpage. This causes a cognitive overload and users can’t even begin to make a decision on how to approach the application because of the large amounts of choices.
- Users have difficulty finding desired features because of the clutter and various options
My Goal: Help users find their desired item in the quickest way possible
Research
As with all my design projects, I like to think about the different component that the design should have. In addition, I like to get insight from a few users to get out of my head and ensure that I’m not making false assumptions about the user. I interviewed six users, all Dartmouth students ranging in age and class year, to get a better understanding of how the average Dartmouth students uses Dartmouth. From there, I made sketches to start thinking about ideas of what the new design should look like.
In addition to the user interviews and sketches, I looked at websites that allowed users to interact with many functions so I looked at websites such as facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube.
Prototyping and Iterating
After a few hours perusing these websites and making sketches I decided it was time to start prototyping on Sketch.
Alas, I had to discard designs that I made, but their deaths were not in vain! I really enjoy seeing the transformation of each design as you try to take bits and pieces of the last iteration to improve the next iteration.
Final Output
In the upper right hand corner, I placed the settings and kept the ability for students to check their DA$H account so that they can check how much money they can spend on food.
From my 6 user interviews, I noticed that users would simply google Dartmouth websites that they needed to access rather than go to the links in Dart Hub. Thus, I decided to remove the links that the users google the most from my Dart hub design.
I added a main search bar directly above the icons indicating that the user can search within the icons to find the items that they needed to access. This is a faster approach rather than trying to click on each icon until they find whatever feature they need.
I found that in the original design, you could find the same desired function (registering for classes for example) in four different ways, so I tried to simplify the choices by grouping icons together and only giving users one or two choices.
To the left I added a side panel with a calendar so that students can keep track of upcoming deadlines, from dates for housing registration to registering for classes. In addition, the side panel also has emergency medical and safety services in case students need to contact security or need information on other important resources.
My main concern with this website is whether I simplified the design too much. I have not conducted any heuristic evaluations with this design, but I could totally see the possibility where a student needs to access a resource in a particular way yet my design restricts them because of its simplicity. I also could have omitted a feature that someone needed and now in my design they can’t access it. In the future, I would like to make sure then that my design is still inclusive while also maintaining the its simplicity.
Reflection
This was a very rewarding challenge because I found out that I could make a full fledged design in 24 hours. I also found it enjoyable to think about every possible Dartmouth student and imagine anyone trying to use the interface. By making time for this project in the middle of the term, I really improved my time management skills and really improved my ability to use Sketch. This project really helped me realize how much I love design and I’m glad that I can continue to create.