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. This site is not public facing
Management Console was a combination of legacy code and new development. So I was often working to try to reuse as many existing code blocks as possible or make changes that would create the most increase to efficiency with the least developer time required
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 application
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
When designing the Management Console Design System I was concerned with 3 main things
A Component based library in order to cut down on future time devoted to design cycles and future development time by using reusable components
Creating layouts with said components that could easily be scaled up and down so they could handle small sets of data (1 object with 1 attribute) to larger sets (1-Many objects with 1-Many attributes) with minimal to zero new complaints designed
Creating easily replicated and simple design patterns that could handle both simple relations 1-1 or complex interrelated 1-Many and Many-Many relations. This takes mental labour off the user by allowing predictability within the system and cuts down on both design and development cycles
My first step in any project is identifying who our target users will be. Our initial users were internal administrative staff so there was a lesser emphasis on visual aids, tutorials, and helper functions in order to speed up the delivery timeline. The understanding was that since all staff would be trained internally there was no need for aids to the user. However I was cognizant that eventually our user base would transition to university administrators with varying levels of technical skills so I designed every components and design patterns with space where I would eventually design these functions when the sprint allowed it
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
I was in the unique position to communicate directly with our clients (university administrators) so I would interview them occasionally to ask about their pain points and what they felt they’d like to see improved. When this was not an available option I evaluate mainly against usability heuristics
In addition to my other responsibilities I was responsible for documenting each component, it’s standard use cases and maintaining the documentation any time changes were made or new patterns were designed. These guides give further agency to developers who are able to sandbox potential user stories for themselves if they are repeating previous design patterns. Since I was a shared resource this also freed up some of my time since I was doing fewer reviews as developers, product owners and even people without familiarity of the project could self evaluate if work on a build was up to design spec.
