KS Orientation in Seattle, Washington

Seattle, Washington

With over 40 participants, the KS Orientation workshop was a jam-packed two days, filled with interactive question and answer periods, presentations and an introduction to new members and collaboration tools. The new faces joining the KS project included members from the University of British Columbia, University of California Berkeley, University of Washington and University of Southern California. Read more on the Berkeley Kuali Student blog.

Amidst all this activity, the KS UX team was pleased to connect with UW’s User Experience lead architect. UW has several people working in this field and KS UX is looking forward to working collaboratively with and expanding the UX community.

People are moving in

Personas are coming up in the world! Beyond t-shirts, email addresses and workspaces, Kuali Student’s own personas are gaining an extra dimension by their inclusion in the nascent Kuali University Data Set. When interested people start using the reference version of Kuali Student, they’ll meet familiar faculty, staff and eventually students in the form of the UX personas.

To stay current with their latest adventures, be sure to visit the personas’s blogs:

• Dr. John Hays (faculty, Geography)
• Martha Lee (central administrator, curriculum)
• Carol Westcliff (department administrator, curriculum)
• Configuration team:
  • Maya Hernandez (business analyst)
  • Pete Svoboda (developer)
  • Ashley Garrett (user experience architect)

Bridge to the next generation

The Kuali Student project’s task is to create a “next generation” student information system. What does that mean? The promise encompasses more than using web 2.0 technologies to deliver web 1.0 capabilities.

It can be difficult for current student information system users to comfortably envision entirely new ways of working. To bridge that gap, the UX team must include scaffolding — cues that suggest current methods – with the new methods so that current users will not be entirely lost.

Stories Help Us Imagine

Stories help us imagine! It is with this sentiment, the UX team begins this week with the task of storyboarding. Storyboards are one of the deliverables the UX team will be preparing alongside UX principles and guidelines, personas and the upcoming wireframes, prototypes and visual design mockups. Find our UX deliverable here.

Storyboarding is a narrative technique of arranging a series of illustrations or visual frames in sequence in order to pre-visualize the user experience and human product interaction.

How do storyboards help?

The combination of narrative and visual presentation can add clarity to the detailing of difficult or intricate interactions. By isolating these from a larger use case or scenario, the UX team is able to tease out some of the trickier parts of the experience and improve the user interaction. Storyboards are also an excellent tool for establishing a common vision about an application part, and can ease communication between the technical and functional teams.

Persona-lizing the Development Process

After weeks of interviews, data analysis, pattern identification, and writing, the UX team is pleased to introduce John, Carol, and Martha, our first personas. John, Carol, and Martha work in different capacities for Kuali University, and will be some of the people eventually using Kuali Student.

Personas are a user experience tool used to separate the developers (us) from our eventual users, remind us that we are not building a product for ourselves, but for others, and ground the design in the needs of real people. Find our personas here.

How do personas help?
When peronas are well developed, they provide a lot of insight into appropriate design choices. Rather than just wondering if a design is usable, we can ask Does this work for Carol? John? Personas can act as a touchstone to a set of user needs, habits, and can facilitate communication across teams.  So while a command line interface might be fully functional, a person who searches for flights on Kayak.com and uses Yahoo! mail is not going to be comfortable with it.

Not all users look like users

New to the Kuali Student project is the idea that people who participate in the Installation, Configuration and Customization (ICC) processes are also users. While not all of them will be using KS-supplied UI, they will still be interacting with the system. In particular, their experiences and the way they relate them to the higher-ed community will affect adoption.

We want KS to be successful. To that end, the ICC process needs to be as (relatively!) easy and predictable as possible. Because no two KS implementations will be alike, we cannot provide much built-in hand holding for ICC; guidance will need to come from documentation, and the implementation community.

While the Installation process will be a major undertaking, it is one with which participating institutions should be familiar. Similarly, Customization may consist of using an CSS editor such as DreamWeaver to provide a look and feel consistent with other applications at any institution. However, the team that performs Configuration will be an entirely new kind of team. More thought needs to go into this aspect and its team.