Welcome to my presentation
This page will guide you through two web projects that dovetail:
- Renew the user experience at North Seattle, Seattle Central, and South Seattle College from the ground up.
- Create an intuitive user interface that offers students a way to navigate more than 130 programs, degrees, and certificates.
👋
Hello, thank you for joining me this morning!
My name is Reed Wacker. I am a Product Designer for Seattle Colleges.
I would like to start with the goals of this past work project.
Goals
- Increase usability for students.
- Clarify branding.
- Move toward consistent navigation.
- Better reflect community and programs.
My role within project and team
- Design lead, liaison with communications.
- Prototyper, production HTML and CSS.
Target users
- Prospective students.
- Current students.
What was the problem to begin with?
- Weak visual brand recognition.
- Legacy systems that were difficult to use.
- Outdated program data (and inconsistent design).
- Target user undefined.
Let's look at how the colleges looked before.
Design decisions based on feedback
- A usability consultant did an audit and provided recommendations.
- We did student surveys for usability feedback.
- Both recommended a prospective student-focused home page.
Let's look at how the colleges looked after.
Programs feature
Student surveys confirmed there were outdated program data and inconsistent designs. Historically the colleges used a combination of HTML table layouts and pdf files for rendering degree and certificate pathways. I was the design lead for this feature. I would design with these two main items in mind:
- Give students accurate data for choosing a degree pathway.
- Build Areas of Study architecture and curate content.
Early kudos
As a League for Innovation college, Program Pathways was chosen as a “Project Highlight” as a district.
Outcomes and reflections
Renewing the user experience achieved two results that were not explicit goals at the outset:
- Enhanced image and reputation.
- Internal teams achieve higher efficiency, consistency, and scalability when building digital products.
What have you learned from the experience?
- Goals must be defined and supported by data.
- Take time to thoughtfully plan.
Did your product meet its goals?
- No, Washington's community colleges experienced a 24% drop in enrollment between fall 2019 and fall 2021 (probably not related).
- Yes, by integrating the user experience into all support services like our CRM and targeting specific groups of prospective students, enrollment has spiked in some places.
Nearly one in four of Seattle Public School 2020 graduates have access to two years of tuition-free college or professional training, thanks to the Seattle Promise program.
I would like to finish with a bright spot. Seattle Promise applications are up 30% for the class of 2022. Nearly 50% of all Seattle Public School seniors have applied. I was lucky to be the lead digital designer for the whole product cycle of the project.
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Thank you. I appreciate you.
Designs
Mockups, production sites, and prototypes: