NYU Albert Redesign
Boosting Course Registration Efficiency
Course registration is an essential part of students’ college lives. It largely affects one’s GPA, graduation date, as well as the overall learning experience.
Every semester, tons of students from New York University are complaining about how frustrating it is to use NYU’s course registration website - Albert. To address this problem for our community, I initiated this project to redesign Albert and finally pitched to the NYU IT department successfully.
DURATION
6 Weeks, Early 2020
PROJECT TYPE
Passion Project. Successfully pitched to New York University.
TEAM
Ruyi C. & Heather K. - UX Designer
Yang Y. - Engineer Consultant
MY ROLE
Lead UX Research, UI/UX Design
Responsible for User Testing, A/B Testing, Prototyping
Revolutionized how NYU students filter through thousands of courses in more than 230 areas of study
Course registration has been an essential part of college students’ lives. Students from New York University find it very hard and frustrating to use their registration platform “Albert” to search, browse and enroll in courses.
The Challenge
Initial Research: What is Users’ Current Experience with Albert?
01. Data Shows that Users are Indeed Suffering:
60 %
Registration Failure Rate
9
Mins to Register Each Class
02. Interviews Show that There are 3 Major User Pain Points:
Pain Point 1: Difficult Use of Search & Filter Function
Students don’t trust the search function, don’t understand what the filters mean, and find position of search elements counterintuitive.
Pain Point 2: Lack of Information Hierarchy
Students are complaining about the readability of Albert (tiny font size, cluttered information display).
Pain Point 3: Duplicated Workflow
Students have to go back and forth a lot between browsing courses, adding them to the wishlist, and enrolling in courses. There are too many unnecessary steps and one single mistake will lead to redoing everything from the very beginning.
Empathize with Users
Explore Experience Journey to Identify Design Opportunities
Comparative Analysis
Direct Comparison: looked at course registration platforms from 8 other schools
Indirect Comparison: looked at design patterns from other businesses (travel, e-commerce)
(Click to expand the images👇)
Design Ideation
“How might we make the Search Bar and Filter Function easier to use and more trustworthy?”
“How might we better organize and display the course information and improve visual hierarchy?”
“How might we simplify the registration workflow?”
NYU Style Guide
I later found out that NYU Albert was made by one professor and several CS students under a short period. CS department agreed that the current programming and template for Albert is outdated, and Albert will be updated soon. Therefore, we decided to incorporate NYU's design system for the newer version to create NYU’s very own registration site.
Final Design
01. Search & Filter Function
02. Improved Visual Hierarchy
03. Smoothened Workflow
04. Final Prototype
BEFORE
Hard to use search/filter function.
Manually browse through tens of thousands of NYU majors/courses.
AFTER
Redesigned the search and filter function.
Boost up efficiency of course searching and browsing experience.
BEFORE
Lack of visual hierarchy.
Difficult to read and distinguish information.
BEFORE
Duplicated workflow.
Students have to go back and forth a lot and tend to get lost.
AFTER
Improved visual hierarchy.
Increased readability and information hierarchy.
AFTER
Simplified and streamlnized workflow.
Built out mental model and utilized e-commerce site’s shopping concept.
Outcome
90%
Registration Success Rate
2
Mins to Register Each Class
Successfully Pitched to New York University IT Department and Started Collaboration.
Reflections
Challenges
This is a very research-heavy project since everyone is complaining about how hard Albert is to use, but no one knows what exactly is the problem. As a designer, coming up with a useful research plan and competitive analysis, as well as synthesizing data within a limited time, can be extremely important in this case.
Can technology support this? There is a constant discussion between the design decisions and engineering ability. We do not have access to the engineering of NYU Albert. However, I did talk to my computer science students to figure out what’s possible.
Takeaways
User experience design is not only about designing an experience for “my users,” but also an experience for “my designer teammate.” Every designer has their ideas and opinions, so when it comes to collaboration, it is essential to set a guideline and an agreement beforehand for a success matrix. We also need to be open-minded and value each other’s work all the same time.
Personas are critical throughout the whole design process. We should always go back and check if our design ideas are needed or are just our assumptions.
Define what’s needed and what’s nice to have. During the data synthesizing process, some users’ inquires are urgent, but some are about personalization. I need to decide what’s the essential part of designing for the first stage.
Potential Next Steps
Since this is the first stage of the redesign, the aim is to solve some current problems. But I should explore more UI patterns later when it goes into the second stage of the redesign.
Revisit the navigation bar to redesign the workflow of switching back and forth between the shopping cart and enrolled courses.
Continuously get more user feedback on high-fidelity design in both quantitate and qualitative ways.
