MyUFL Final NEW_merged

Executive Summary
This project aims to redesign myUFL, an online services portal for target users: faculty and
students at the University of Florida (UF). Our challenge will be how to make a more informative
home page with efficient navigation. We first analyzed the deficiencies of the current design,
which is insufficient in usability goals such as efficiency, learnability, and memorability. Users
find it takes lots of time to get familiar with the interface since the home page doesn’t provide
much useful information and all the services are embedded under the navigation menu, which is
hard to notice and find at first time.
Then, we set up user research to investigate what users care about most during their experience
of online self-services. We interviewed four graduate students from the class and developed the
affinity diagram according to their experience. Several user needs were concluded from the
affinity diagram, the key idea is that users would prefer self-services that can be accessed and
completed efficiently. Some of them also mentioned preference on aesthetics and concerns on
security.
Finally, with the user research as a guideline, we brainstormed and developed our redesign
solution: a new home page of myUFL, with informative announcements, services panels, and
widgets. The rationale for the design decisions that correspond to the user experience (UX) design
concepts (affordances, metaphors, feedback, mappings), and our user research were provided.
Introduction
MyUFL website is a portal designed for providing various online self-services for UF faculty and
students [1] . Each student/faculty uses the website for different purposes. For example; some might
use it daily for schedule, some might use it monthly/annually for insurance, others might use it for
training courses and the rest might use it for human resources (HR) related applications.
However, we found that the existing design of myUFL has several problems, such as not intuitive
navigation, and lacking useful information on the home screen. How to provide informative and
easy-to-use navigation will be our main challenge. To address this challenge, we analyzed the
deficiencies of the current design, then conducted user research to figure out user needs for an
online self-service.
Finally, we proposed a new design for the myUFL main page according to the analysis of the
current design, detailed user research, and principles of UX design. The rationale of the key
features in our new design shows the improvement of a more efficient and user-friendly interface.
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