Radical and Revolutionary Design

2 September 2016

There are many people on the margins of our technocratic society for whom there is still no advocate or defender in the design and implementation of technology. As a college advisor, I help students with the minutiae of the process of applying to and succeeding in college. Many of these clients are first-generation college students who face significant financial and social barriers in their educational path, and unfortunately technology is often an obstacle they must overcome rather than an aid.

I’ve seen first-hand how important usability and interaction design are to enabling the disenfranchised and underrepresented. Students are expected to keep track of usernames, passwords, ID numbers, and security questions for financial aid applications, college applications, and university portals; often they are tasked with creating additional, unique usernames and passwords for transcript request systems or orientation session registration pages. Simply signing up for a course can be a byzantine task. The assumptions and cues that we take for granted as savvy users are often incomprehensible or counter-intuitive for those who do not have stable internet access at home and are not computer literate. Moreover, even those of us who are advisors and have used computers our whole lives find many of these systems confusing and frustrating.

Having been a first-generation college student myself, I know how important it is for these systems to be intuitive and intelligible rather than discouraging. Education completely disrupted the socioeconomic trajectory of my life and that of my family. Information can be transformative. It’s a shame that ill-conceived design is obscuring information for others and also demonstrates how important UX design, research, and strategy really are. For many companies, the ultimate goal of design is to complete the buyer’s cycle and to complete a purchase. For others, it’s to make information accessible and to provide a valuable and enjoyable experience. For a college or university, the stakes are high. Bad design can mean the difference between meeting a degree requirement or receiving necessary financial aid and dropping out.

Whereas industry has adopted UX in recent years, colleges, universities, and financial aid systems are lagging behind in a very bad way. Portals are decades-old, and updates are implemented unevenly. Systems are not unified, and students are the ones that have to keep track of multiple usernames, PINs, passwords, and email addresses. Digitization is transforming the systems, but its design and implementation is not intentional and thus making matters worse. Many students and parents express desire for things to be simpler or to “go back to pen and paper.” Bad design is failing them and they are losing trust. The question is whether or not the educational and governmental sectors will become design-intentional or if we have to wait for the private sector to intervene on students’ behalf.