In the year 2021, I experienced my worst digital and administrative experiences while navigating my school portal and, during my registration respectively. So, I decided to fix it. Here are some of the problems I took note of:
Defining the project goals
Mismatched icons - The "share" icon was used to replace the "caret right" icon on the school portal.
Poor navigation - The students portal was a nightmare to navigate through.
Non-coherent records keeping process - Admin staff recording new student's data on an excel sheet rather than an admin database.
Results never came - My results were either printed and pasted on a public bulletin board or read out to me by my lecturers despite word from the admin staff and lecturers saying it will and should be uploaded.
Location nightmare - I had to visit multiple offices and stand on really long lines just to submit my credentials like results and payment receipts.
In order to validate, understand and shed more light on the issue, I first conducted surveys to understand the who and the why behind these frustrations. I also conducted user interviews to dig deeper into their preferences.
I discovered while conducting primary research that School Management Systems(SMS) were the best solution for the problems highlighted above. So I dug deeper and did a competitive analysis of the top rated SMS's in Nigeria.
Here are the key takeaways I got from the research
The results from the user surveys gave a general overview of the most common problems encountered by the affected demographic. User interviews gave deeper insights to their problems while the market research conducted educated me on the best practices on what worked and what didn't.
Students want a convenient all-in-one digital solution to solve their communication, and academic needs like assignments and submissions.
"It should be an all in one system from checking and submitting assignments to latest info about classes and online materials for the various topics in for each course"
Parents and guardians want a more efficient way of making payments
"All payments are made at the bank. An improvement will be to make all payments be in one particular bank. Most of the banks are far from eachother. It will be less stressful that way."
Here is a link to the key takeaways of from the research conducted
Who I'll be designing for
A non-complex school management system which is a student and admin portal, parent/guardian portal, a website
Easy to understand onboarding for all users
An end-to-end system that has accountability and usability at its forefront.
Priority on how the users interact with the system
It has to have a proper hierarchy depending on the use-case scenario (journey maps)
General hierarchy or architecture -> use case scenarios -> use case hierarchy
Start with ideating the general admin hierarchy, then the site hierarchy (Lo-fi testing), then case scenarios(user test), then the color, icon, and font picking (don’t be stingy with it), then the Hi-fi design.
Student admission and registration flow
One of the issues we had to tackle was how to make the course registration and admission process much easier for all the parties involved (students, staff, and admin). Here are the old and new flows on how the students register after gaining admission and make payments.
I asked myself this question - "Why do the students have to re-register their credentials all over again if they already submitted it to the school while seeking admission?
Old flow
New flow
Design
The design system
After creating the flows and site maps, it was time to design the first iteration of the product. While I was building out the high fidelity design, I was also building the design system for the system. Being aware of just how large the project was bound to get in the long run, I decided to have everything organized as a system. I took inspiration from some systems like the Carbon design system from IBM, and the Atlassian design systems
