Low fidelity mockups

These mockups are a great way to start off a project conversation. A designer can quickly mockup layout options without investing a lot of time. This can be done either before a meeting or at the meeting and helps to get immediate feedback.

Low fidelity mockups also have the added benefit of presenting information in an informal way that subconsciously gives stakeholders permission to critique. The more polished an early presentation appears, the less likely a stakeholder will feel that they can offer critique. Or worse yet, stakeholders give feedback, not on the layout or content, but on the style, which is too early to do at this stage.

Here I created various layout options based on the precedents we studied for use in our team meeting. Cutting out elements into separate modules allowed us to explore options as a group that I did not think to explore on my own and helped inform an unexpected but exciting direction in the wireframe phase.

Wireframes

The sidebar navigation option seemed too much like a retail site such as Amazon and failed to give the students an exploratory experience. The team wanted something that reflected the values of Boston College.

Boston College is a Jesuit Institution and a series of questions that is posed to the incoming Freshman class is:

1. What brings you joy?
2. What are you good at?
3. What does the world need you to be?

The spirit of this personal exploration is captured in the quote:

User feedback and test sessions

As much as the team was pleased with the wireframe layout, further discussions showed that there was a potential political battle within departments if we started to tie abstract student interests to degrees in such a literal manner.

So we moved forward using degree categories that are already being used to organize degrees on the school websites as the tag filters.

I also sat down with three current Boston College students for user testing sessions. The design was well received and was viewed as a major improvement.

High fidelity mockups

The revisions incorporated from user feedback was the hierarchy arrangement of the search bar in relation to the tags. It was not clear that a user could conduct a search and then filter the search results with tags. Any new search will clear out the results because the search bar was higher on the page and more important.

The search tool now returns results from a query that is run on the degree abstract and expanded detail explanation, a subtle way for us to allow students to still search based on their interest.