Studium UI/UX Design

Industry

Ed-tech

Year

2023

Organization

Studium Tech

My Role

UI/UX Designer

Description

Studium is a B2B SaaS platform for University Accreditations. Studium's Accreditation product is a complex, enterprise-grade product used by colleges & universities as a helping hand in their accreditation processes. My job at Studium included working through the entire design process on the multiple products, which included conducting thorough domain research by understanding documentation & discussing with domain experts, designing the information architecture and UX, designing interfaces and testing the completed modules.

Problem Statement

Colleges and faculty face significant challenges in obtaining accreditation due to the complex and time-consuming nature of the process. Managing extensive documentation, ensuring compliance with stringent standards, and co-ordinating across multiple departments creates a daunting task. This often leads to inefficiencies, stress, and delays, making it difficult for institutions to achieve and maintain a decent accreditation status.

User Persona

Age: 30-40
Occupation: College Professor
Location: Pune, India
Persona: Sandeep is an Associate Professor at a tier-II Management college in Pune. His college is going to apply for the NAAC accreditation in the next academic year. Neither Sandeep nor college management have much idea as to how to navigate the maze of accreditations. Getting a bad NAAC grade will hamper college admissions & grants received by the college. Sandeep is fed up of doing documentation for NAAC as his passion is teaching and he sees accreditation work as an additional burden on his head. The college needs a platform to guide them & manage all of their accreditation work in a centralized manner.

Challenges

Objectives

  1. Eliminate the need for faculty to study complex accreditation documentation.

  2. Enable quick and accurate data entry for accreditation criteria.

  3. Provide real-time progress tracking for all stakeholders including top management.

  4. Generate actionable insights to improve accreditation scores.

  5. Support multiple accreditation frameworks and organizational levels.

  6. Automate report generation from collected data.

  7. Track institutional improvements across accreditation cycles.

  8. Streamline accreditation with supporting productivity modules.

Solution

An accreditation management software which centralizes management of all data. Provides insights to the college management on work being done, provides a birds eye view. Insights make visible potential areas of improvement. It also eases the burden by guiding faculties on which data is required at what stage. All the data is compiled in a standard format & your final report is printed.

Design Process

  1. Initial Research: Designing for accreditation & related modules is a highly domain heavy task. Thus, the research phase of this process included not only the end users, but other surrounding stakeholders as well. When designing a new module, research is conducted in collaboration with potential users (faculty & college management) as well as domain experts.

  2. Ideation: Based on the requirements and challenges gathered from stakeholders, an ideation session is conducted. Sometimes in collaboration with stakeholders to create effective design solutions.

  3. Wireframes: Based on the initial research and ideation the entire flow of the module is created in wireframes, which go through internal approvals for design. First paper wireframes & then mid-fidelity wireframes are created using Figma.

  4. Design & Prototype: Wireframes are then made into full-fledged flows of finished designs along with prototyping. Prototyping also helps the internal tech team understand the flow better, resulting in their job getting easier.

  5. Usability Testing & Iterating: Designed modules are then made into functional previews by developers, which can be tested for usability & technical issues before releasing the module. At this stage designers collaborate with developers as well as the customer success team to test the modules. For user testing, the module is released to a small sample of users and feedback is gathered.

  6. Push to prod: Feedback from user testing & internal testing is incorporated, the final version is then pushed to production & released for all users.

Impact

Studium's accreditation product has had a strong impact amongst stakeholders in the education industry.

  1. Product used by 2,000+ faculty members & management.

  2. Faculties reported spending less time studying documentation & more time teaching.

  3. Easy collaboration across all members with cloud-based access control.

  4. Centralized data-storage for multiple accreditations means no duplicate work.

  5. Management understands their accreditation-readiness & areas of improvement before the actual cycle through predictive scores.

  6. Data viz dashboards show your entire institute's health in a glance, across criteria.

  7. Automated report generation means no manual formatting & compilation work.