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.

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)

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.

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.

The important thing is to not outline every single possible behaviour, but rather show most likely user experience. It’s a good way to understand what the product does without being overwhelmed by every tiny detail. Using the storyboard as a format for describing a business function or design idea encourages the team to show crucial steps within single visual frames and let go of those long never ending paragraphs that, because of volume, can be challenging and tedious to read.

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.

What’s next?
Over the development process, these personas will evolve and grow more detailed. Right now, we only have research on LUM activities. For the next release, we will add a new component of responsibilities and needs, whether that’s enrollment, scheduling, or financials.

A final thought
UX experts have been using personas for years to aid in the development process. They’re nothing new, but they are a tried and tested way of building user-centered products.

Personas are perhaps the best tool in the user-centered design toolbox for communicating empathy — they feel like real people with real concerns, and can transfer insights realizedthrough research to other members of the project team. – Peter Merholtz, Usability Expert

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.

A set of UX principles is a standard best practice when developing a system, Google has a great set of 10 principles that “contribute to a Googley user experience”

UX Principle: KS student centered, but focused on the USER
KS is designed to support the student experience, but that doesn’t mean it is always meant to be used by the student. KS keeps the user in mind, whether that is the administrator, the javascript programmer, the chemistry professor, or the registrar. This may mean that KS will offer different interfaces to different users (expert vs novice), but will ultimately facilitate all in accomplishing tasks. People will have different needs, KS will respect those needs and respond accordingly.

Read our other UX principles here.

The UX team for Kuali student, Rachel, Cindy, and Kristina, will use this blog to keep the KS development community up to date on what’s going on with the UX team, interesting UX-related developments, ideas, and actions. In the coming weeks, you can meet and get some background on the Kuali Student Personas and thier development, read our UX guidelines and principles, and get insights into our storyboard and wireframe development.

Rachel, Cindy, and Kristina