Buff Portal - Integrating Student Affair Articles
Improving the Visibility of Student Affairs Articles for Enhanced Student Engagement.
Context
CU Boulder’s Student Affairs team creates valuable content for students covering topics such as academic skills, wellness, and campus involvement. However, these articles were primarily published in CU Boulder Today (CUBT) emails and suffered from low visibility and engagement. Our task was to address this problem by integrating these articles into Buff Portal (Student Portal for University of Colorado Boulder), making them more accessible and relevant for students.
This project required a fast-paced, collaborative approach involving multiple stakeholders, rapid prototyping, and usability testing to create a seamless, student-friendly experience.
Role
UX Designer
Timeline
July - Sept 2024
Tools
Figma & Figjam
Jira
Adobe Illustrator
UserTesting
TLDR
Delivering Personalized Content to Enhance Student Engagement
This project focused on designing and integrating Student Affairs articles into Buff Portal to make them more visible and engaging for students. By conducting user research, leading collaborative design sessions, and iterating through prototypes, we developed a personalized experience that allowed students to easily access the resources they needed. This case study outlines the process, from research to final implementation, and highlights the impact of our design decisions.
Research Phase
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 Platform
Buff Portal is the official student dashboard for CU Boulder, where students access essential academic information like course schedules, grades, and financial aid. Designed with a modular card-based layout, it allows students to interact with key information quickly, prioritizing essential updates such as grades and schedules at the top. While the portal effectively manages academic data, it lacked a streamlined system for integrating additional content like Student Affairs articles, which led to low visibility for important resources related to student life.
Analyzing Current Solutions
Currently, Student Affairs articles are sent directly to students' inboxes from the Student Affairs email. However, this approach has led to low engagement, as many students either ignore the emails or rarely open them to read the articles that might be relevant to them. The click-through rate remains low, and valuable information in these articles often goes unnoticed. Recognizing this issue, the Student Affairs team approached the Buff Portal team with the idea of integrating these articles directly into the Buff Portal. The goal was to increase visibility, encourage more interaction, and ensure that students could benefit from the helpful resources without the need for them to actively seek out or open separate emails.
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 GOAL
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.
Increase Visibility
Make Student Affairs content easy to find.
Enhance Engagement
Ensure articles are relevant to students’ academic and personal interests.
Improve UX
Deliver content without disrupting the user flow of Buff Portal.
USER RESEARCH
Collaborative Design Sessions and Insights
To tackle the challenge effectively within a limited timeframe, we conducted a collaborative design session with 16 CU Boulder students. This interactive FigJam session, moderated by me with support from the Buff Portal UX team, allowed us to gather 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.
Design Activity
Participants sketched solutions for integrating articles into Buff Portal, focusing on personalization, accessibility, and engagement.
Feedback and Discussion
Students presented their ideas, provided feedback on each other’s designs, and voted on the most promising solutions.
Examples of some Student made Designs…
Wire framing
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.
View Prototype
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.
👋🏼
Thank you for reading this case study.
Your interest and feedback are appreciated!
Raj Ostawal
Product Designer
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