Going into this project, my goals of it were to improve the user experience of finding information about electives for current and prospective Massey students. I also wanted to make it extremely easy and rewarding to upload feedback about the course – and that was definitely the biggest challenge I faced.

One of my other personal goals for the project was to have a live website that people can use and I can properly test with – I tried prototyping with Figma and XD and because of the lack of real world data for the feedback and upload process, it wasn’t very convincing. In the end, I was able to create a working site, which helped my design and testing process immensely. I was able to thoroughly test my upload process and get real user reactions because of the multiple different rabbit holes you could go down, rather than a prototype which has a set path.

It was definitely one of the most challenging projects I’ve worked on to date because of the complexity of the data involved too. I had to scrape course information from the Massey website which included course data and information and photos about lecturers. In testing I realised that I needed individual photos related to each elective which massey didn’t have. I figured in the end that I could simply scrape free to use images from google by using the elective title as the search name.

In our final week, I was very happy to do testing with students and hear feedback like “Is massey using thing?” and “Is this real? When can I start using it?” – which is always the best feedback to get. It’s not the flashiest design style, but I purposely went with a simple and easy to navigate site, and focused on the UX experience – although I am personally quite pleased with the way the UI came out. In my final testing, people rarely got lost or had to ask me questions.

I’m also very glad I limited the scope of the project from the outset – my target audience was just Massey COCA students, and the information was only about electives. As I improve the site through the coming weeks, I’d like to increase the scope of the project and I already have a bunch of ideas – such as including core classes, introducing pathways and possible careers, and generally having more information regarding what happens throughout a student’s time at Massey – I also would definitely include an area and system on the site for lecturers to upload content about their course – but for the scope of this project have focused on the student experience first and foremost.

Looking back, I’m very grateful I took a long time to figure out the UX of the site and do a lot of user testing with classmates and 3rd years upstairs. It really helped mould what the site has become and I wouldn’t have as good as a result without that testing and feedback. For example, one person told me they’d love to see other students blogs all in one place because they spend a tonne of time scraping tumblr looking for student examples. Another student gave the extremely valuable feedback that digging up images of their work could slow down the UX and be a painful process since often students move old projects to hard drives – so by allowing both blog uploads and photo uploads during the quiz, I get the best of both worlds – students who have blogs can upload them easily, and students without can still upload a photo if they have they stored locally and ready to go, if they feel like it.

I’m also so grateful for the flexibility of my lecturers to allow me to do this project. It’s something that really pushed me creatively and skills/tooling wise and I’m very appreciative of that allowance. It was very cool to see it come together and to work with friends and peers on their feedback and creating something from a student’s point of view. I’m very excited for whatever comes of the project and hope to continue to develop it throughout the rest of the year. It’s currently live right now at electives.webflow.io as a fully responsive site, with the upload/quiz flow working and I’ll be putting it into beta during the 6 week break to continue to collect feedback and impressions on it. Thank you!

PS: Rather than doing a fully functioning Figma design file, I opted to code the entire site which is what worked best for me in my workflow. There is still some functionality in the Figma as I was testing some flows. Please feel free to poke around the site, it's pretty much fully functional and responsive. It's live at www.electives.webflow.io