the training hub

WHERE ouR JOURNEY BEGINS (project OVERVIEW)

The TrainingHub is a comprehensive training management system for all staff, faculty, students, and guests within a university community. After many failed vendor proposals, the team decided to build an in-house system and decided to include UX research in their process.

Project Team - Lead UX Researcher (Me), Office of Information Technology senior leadership, Development Team, Training Team, C-Suite

Project Timeline – 4 months

what we wanted to discover (PROJECT GOALS)

We needed to learn more about our users and their experiences taking a training course. We then had to create the experience that accommodated these needs within our constraints.

Goal 1. Understand and define all the personas who would be using the system

Goal 2. Create a robust input form for all personas to register and administer basic training courses across all departments.

Goal 3. All courses followed an intuitive flow for a multi-day, and multi-location delivery system.

Goal 4. All scores are synced and collated across third-party, instructor, and student platforms.

our plan for success (RESEARCH STRATEGY)

After identifying the initial needs of the product I recommended a multi-prong, mixed-methods approach that included identifying the following research milestones:

Milestone 1: Define the problem statement & gather user requirements

Milestone 2: Generate comprehensive process flows and clarify user personas

Milestone 3: Advocate for collaborative user development and generate an initial working product roadmap.

Milestone 4: Create a design thinking approach in the system experience and in the multi-level form designs.

Milestone 5: Run iterative design thinking workshops to iterate through each persona experience define wireframes and a testing plan.

This project was a huge milestone within Central IT, at this university. This was the first time the university team incorporated UX research at the start of building a product.

OUR main CHALLENGES

Resistance of stakeholders. All our stakeholders were very uncomfortable with the time and effort involved in foundational user research. All the teams were very siloed, which resulted in large failures in scope definition.

Utilization of resources. The team insisted on creating wireframes themselves instead of utilizing resources so I facilitated the team through daily 4-hour sketching workshops and brainstorming sessions, over the period of 2 months, to produce the needed wireframes.

Legacy system and scope shift. The team and I were unaware until halfway through the project that the system was being built on top of a legacy platform. We also discovered the development team was altering design elements and flows for ease of development. As a result, there was a lack of consistency across some UI design elements and user flows.

The final design needed extra iterations to accommodate these design constraints and scope of the platform, to maintain the integrity of the users’ experience. Balancing stakeholder buy-in, team communication, rapid scope shift, and building on a legacy system made the experience quite challenging.

HOW WE EXECUTED OUR STRATEGY (RESEARCH PROCESS)

These are a few of the primary research questions I posed to begin the research and requirements process:

How can the course creation form allow workflow for courses with a variety of delivery types (in person, online, combination)?

How can the course creation process be intuitive and provide users with a linear workflow?

How does the form incorporate prerequisite enrollment functionality?

What defines completion (self reported, instructor based, online source, combination) for the course?

How is completion for each course identified by the training system?

How are multiple completions handled and marked - who had control over these?

All team members were SMEs, and able to define the different user types. So, I facilitated several empathy mapping workshops through a combination of post-it and whiteboarding sessions. These working sessions helped the team understand that they needed to align their vision to their users' needs. We were able to define tasks, feelings, influences, goals, and pain points for each user type. This provided the team gain an expert level of insight into their users. It helped me understand the relationship between all the user types, discover overlapping needs, and identify the dependencies between them.

I used this data to craft realistic personas for the team to center all the experiences in the system around. This fundamental change in perspective placed the users’ needs at the forefront and guided the design for the entire system.

TOOLS WE USED

Tools – User Interviews, Affinity Diagramming, Empathy Mapping, A/B Testing, Personas, Strategic Analysis, Whiteboarding, Wireframing, Usability Evalutations

bringing our research to life (DESIGN PROCESS)

Mental Model for Course Creation Form, Brainstorming & Design Thinking Sketching Sessions, Mockups, A/B & User Testing. Form Design

My main goals while designing this course creation form was to ensure intuitiveness in the user flows for all personas, minimize dependencies, and eliminate unnecessary steps. Our design process went through the following 5 stages.

Stage 1. I had to define the high-level mental model of the course creation form, that would satisfy the use cases for all course types. Once defined, the information architecture model and process flow of the form would fall into place.

Stage 2. I led the team through an inductive design thinking workshop which proved to be quite challenging since it was not the linear process that they were expecting. Through a rigorous, iterative sketching process I was able to guide the team to determine a logic process that worked for all user types.

Stage 3. Once we defined the mental model for the form, I was able to design all the user flows for each persona through the form. Once I had defined the needs for each user type, I began generating mockups for the course creation form.

The project manager then decided that the team needed to create the mockups together. Using expert-level facilitation techniques, I led the team in several 4-6 hour sketching workshops per week, to lead the team in design thinking and strategies to generate mid-fidelity wireframes.

Stage 4. I led intermittent usability testing on our wireframes throughout the process, to make sure we were meeting user needs, and providing a consistent design experience for our users.

The team struggled with reaching a consensus on several design decisions and choices. To center our users' in our design process, I facilitated several A/B testing sessions to guide the team towards an intentional decision.

Stage 5. I led the team through this iterative design and testing process until we had a good working draft of our course creation form. Once complete, we followed a similar process to create all remaining extension forms for the system.

the impact we had

Our research process led to this being one of the most user-friendly and successful products built, in-house. The system launched on time despite initial inconsistencies in scope and constraints.

Primary feedback was that all users' felt heard and found the system very intuitive to use. This is still a widely used system and impacts ~100,000 university community members, daily, across 5 campuses.

This system and its research plan are still used to advocate for early adoption of UX research when building products.

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