Education Planner BC // Management Console

Administrative software can be either a thing of nightmares or dreams – ask any admin worker. Management Console gives university administrators agency to customize the applications they will be sending out and review the applications received. Management Console is used by all 19 public post secondary institutions of British Columbia.

Additionally, the Rules UI allowed users without any programming experience to create complex queries in a visual interface. Non technical users needed to be able to attach different questions to different applications. For instance Question A may be asked if the user was: born before 1997 and from British Columbia but NOT if the user had a GPA of below 3.5. These kinds of queries can become complex and were creating significant overhead on the EducationPlanner BC staff to insert into the database as every Post Secondary Institution in BC has hundreds of potential optional questions they wish to put on their application depending on the applicant.

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Example screenshots have been provided for data security reasons.

Role

UX Designer

TimeLine

July 2022 - Ongoing

Goal

Create a simpler work environment that university admins can use with minimal training.

Problem

University admins were heavily reliant on EducationPlannerBC to teach them how to use the software. The software was initially designed based on developer needs, but the organization and hierarchy of the information was very unintuitive to the end users.

Solution

Restructuring the pages into more logical groupings
Standardizing design patterns and components so users can intuitively figure out what a page would do or behave based only on visual cues
Using consistent language in order to make users expend less energy on decision making to discern what a component would do.
Decreasing visual clutter on the page by strategically hiding or minimizing less necessary information.
Creating more system feedback to the user in order to self diagnose issues.
Creating more integrated help systems to give the user agency to help themselves without tech support intervention.
Implementing multi functionality to allow users to process large volumes of data faster

A card sorting exercise was done to help cluster similar tasks that are used most frequently by users. Interviews with university staff were also conducted.

Common Pain Points

"It's hard to find the features I'm looking for "

"I can't tell if my changes worked or not"

"It's time consuming to add individual components for 100s of upates"

Assets and process

Final Product

No items found.

Mobile