Tanya Cardoza

Degree Planner

We overhauled the old SCAD degree program, streamlining it into a more efficient and student-focused experience.

Overview

The Current SCAD degree planner is facing various issues that hinder students with their academic journey. These issue include inaccurate course information, limited customization options, and a lack of integration with real-time academic data.

Approach

Client:

SCAD

My Role:

Ux Researcher/ Designer

Year:

2024

Service Provided:

Web Design

Challenge

The overall usability of the SCAD Degree Planner leaves much to be desired. While it shows promise in certain areas, there are several key issues that hinder the user experience.

Research

Competitive Analysis


Based on our competitive analysis, we identified key areas where our competitors were lacking and discovered opportunities to differentiate our product design and strategy.

Survey Insights



Surveyed the student body to acquire valuable insights and make informed decisions. We found students did not regularly rely on the SCAD Degree planner in it's current state.

Personas With Storyboards


Sarah King represents our understanding of dedicated students seeking to enhance their academic journey through a more efficient degree planner.

Jess is a Success Advisor at SCAD, dedicated to understanding and addressing the needs of students.

User Testing

We found some displayed information wasn't relevant and moved it to a dropdown menu. We improved the visibility of class completion status and icons, and added a clear key to help students understand class status indicators.



Final Design

Worksheets page


Our worksheets page features an elevated and highly communicative design.

Plans page


Upon selecting  a class students now have convenient access to relevant course information.

What-if (AI integration) page


With the integration of AI, students can now confidently acquire a greater depth of knowledge and flexibly tailor their degree plan to their needs.

Conclusion

During this project, my primary responsibility was to lead the UX design initiatives. As well as leveraging robust interaction design techniques. To ensure that the redesign and concept fully met the requirements and effectively fulfill the needs of students.

About 3 months post redesign the servicer who SCAD uses updated the design of the SCAD Degree Planner. Their redesign was very validating to our design thinking and research decisions. Their redesign follows very similar design solutions we had also delivered. Here are some examples.


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