Student Information System

(In Progress)

The Company

Infinite Campus is a Student Information System with over 10 Million active student users across the United States. This web-based software contains over 1400 tools to help teachers and administrators perform their job tasks faster and easier but digitizing and automating time consuming tasks so they can get back to doing what they love: educating students.

Design System Improvements

As part of a multi-step process to improve the UX maturity at the company: I spearheaded an initiative to improve the Design System. After speaking with internal stakeholders and individual contributors. I discovered that the design system was out of date, contained inaccurate information, and, according to users was “impossible to find anything.” My first step was to complete a tree test to better organize the Design System menu. I conducted two rounds of tree testing with internal employees to find out how they would categorize design fundamentals, followed by a card sort activity to finalize the menu organization.

Objectives:

• Solicit feedback on a potential reorganized Design System menu

• Identify areas of confusion in organization and terminology

• Identify opportunities for education on UX/UI concepts

Methodology:

• Tree Testing

  • Figma wireframe that functioned like a nested navigation menu but was devoid of any design or branding to avoid distraction.

  • Test and reiterate

  • 26 total Participants (12 in round 1, 14 in round 2. All active users of the Design System)

  • 10 tasks asking them to find information about scenarios they might encounter at Infinite Campus. They were encouraged to interact with the prototype as they would the actual Design System.

• Card Sorting

  • Taking the feedback from the Tree Testing, we conducted a card sort activity with 60 particpants

Takeaways:

Participants were able to complete the tasks in round 2 significantly better than in round 1 and most noted an improvement from the current state. The card sort analysis showed significant alignment on the topic names with their categories. Participants grouping of the cards aligned with our proposed menu over 83% of the time.

After testing, I shared these results with stakeholders and leadership and offered a plan for next steps. We had learned how users expect to see the design system organized, as well as identified areas of opportunity for internal education to close knowledge gaps. These gaps would be addressed in a series of UX education lessons that I would curate and lead.