Minor Selector – Golden Boy Studios

University of Applied Sciences

For the University of Applied Sciences (HvA) I collaborated with some other designers to redesign the user experience of their minor selector.

The university had found that a lot of students had trouble with finding the right minor for them. So they wanted to make changes to help the students find their match.

Follow Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

How did I go about it?

The goal of this project was to redesign the Minor Portal, called “Kieswijzer”, of the HvA, making it easier for students to find the right minor for them by informing them better.

To do so I looked into the original system and why it could possibly fail at its goal. Going through the portal with a ‘Be the User’ approach showed that it was fairly difficult to align your interests to specific minors. This immediately causes you to need to look through most of the catalogue without much of a guideline, making it so that you also just might miss something that could be of interest to you. And something else that was jarring was that some of the original wording could be interpreted in different ways, making some of the directions somewhat unclear.

With this initial bit of knowledge I started using multiple different forms of user research with the students of the university and did research with the teachers on this topic, to figure out what they thought of the original product and looking for ways to improve it.

From this research I learned a lot, but here are some examples:

– People thought that the portal lacked information in some cases because the teacher are the ones describing the minor, but the way it was set up also caused people to not look at the extra information presented;

– Something else that was in the teachers hands was the ability to choose the tags that are added to the pages which might cause indirect issues with the filtering system;

– The students found it hard to use and didn’t really know what the portal was actually using to determine what minors it would recommend them;

– Lots of students couldn’t find the portal or didn’t know it existed.

The next phase was to start figuring out what would work and what the students wanted from this portal. For this I did some more research with the students about feature they would like to see in a redesigned version of the portal. Through this research I learned about what students think is important when it comes to their choices and how they want to have that presented.

With this information we started working on a prototype that we took through multiple rounds of user testing and A/B testing to eventually end up with this redesign. It both represents the HvA better visually and has gotten great reviews from the students who got to try it.

We added ways for students to interact with the minors within this platform, giving people looking for one better options for finding the right one through a new and improved filtering system, a more comprehensive questionnaire that is easier to understand and gives better recommendations through highlights and gives students the ability to add minors that interest them to a list so them can easily retrace their steps.

But it isn’t just students looking for one that can interact with the system. Students that have just finished their minors can help improve clarity by giving insights about the minor they have just completed.

As a final addition I also put out some recommendations for the implementation of the system. To avoid having some teachers giving close to no information and others telling too much it was recommended to add a template that the teachers could fill out to streamline information. And the teachers could find help in describing their activities by using the comments from students that have previously completed the program.

And to make sure the students can actually find the portal it was recommended to add a large banner on the website of the university and send out more e-mails with links attached to the portal for students who are approaching that time in their school years.

What I’m most proud of within this project is that I, and the other designers, didn’t just manage to redesign this portal. But we also created a way to make sure that the people that use it are the ones that also keep it running.

The following files showcase documentation of this project. I recommend to either download the files or read them in presentation mode. The following documents are in Dutch.