BuffPortal
Improving the Visibility of Student Affairs Articles for Enhanced Student Engagement.
Context
Delivering Personalized Content to Enhance Student Engagement
CU Boulder’s Student Affairs team provides valuable content on academics, wellness, and campus life, but these articles had low visibility in CUBT emails. Our task was to integrate them into Buff Portal, enhancing accessibility and engagement. This fast-paced project involved collaboration, rapid prototyping, and usability testing to create a student-friendly experience.
Research
We started with an in-depth research phase to understand the current state of Buff Portal and the challenges students faced with accessing Student Affairs articles.
Understanding the Buff Portal
Buff Portal is CU Boulder's official student dashboard for accessing academic essentials like schedules, grades, and financial aid. Its modular card-based layout prioritizes key updates but lacked a streamlined way to integrate Student Affairs articles, reducing visibility for important student life resources.
Understanding the current solution
Student Affairs articles are currently emailed to students but see low engagement, as many ignore or rarely open them. To address this, the Student Affairs team proposed integrating these articles into Buff Portal to boost visibility, encourage interaction, and make resources more accessible.
THE PROBLEM
Low Visibility and Engagement of Student Affairs Articles
The challenge was to overcome the low visibility and engagement of Student Affairs articles in Student emails. Students were unaware of important resources because they were difficult to find, buried beneath irrelevant content, and not personalized for their needs.
Desired Solution
Integrating the Articles seamlessly in Student Buff Portal
The goal was to integrate Student Affairs articles directly into Buff Portal, making them more visible and accessible. This approach aimed to boost engagement by presenting the content where students already interact, ensuring valuable resources were easy to find and explore.
Project goals
Making helpful articles more visible!
Our goal was to seamlessly integrate Student Affairs articles into Buff Portal in a way that was intuitive, personalized, and engaging for students.
USER RESEARCH
Collaborative Design Sessions and Insights
To address the challenge within a limited timeframe, we held a collaborative FigJam session with 16 CU Boulder students. Moderated by me with support from the Buff Portal UX team, this interactive session helped generate diverse ideas and co-create solutions efficiently.
Context Setting
Students were introduced to the problem of low visibility and engagement with Student Affairs articles and how their input would shape the design.
Participants sketched solutions for integrating articles into Buff Portal, focusing on personalization, accessibility, and engagement.
Students presented their ideas, provided feedback on each other’s designs, and voted on the most promising solutions.
Wireframing
Start with creating a visual representations of the solution.
The initial wireframes were created to outline the basic structure and user flow of the app. These early-stage designs underwent numerous iterations to refine the layout and enhance usability. We essentially ended up with 2 versions of prototypes to test with the students.
Design 1
Design 2
Final Prototypes
Making the final visual designs for the 2 user testable prototypes.
Made two iterations of the ultimate model. The aesthetic layout was influenced by the current design framework employed by Buff Portal, while also enhancing the library with a variety of elements and components for potential future utilization.
user testing
Another round of user feedback on the final prototypes
Conducted user testing sessions remotely using video conferencing software (Zoom). Guided users through the working high-fidelity prototypes, observing and noting their actions and feedback.
Documented all user comments from the testing sessions in a structured table within a spreadsheet. Subsequently, analyzed the notes to identify the preferred prototype version and determine additional revisions or improvements needed.
