Designing a college campus-based Noticeboard Web app

What is IMG?

Information Management Group is a student group, which cultivates technical innovation and drives the development of software systems and niche applications which empathize with the residents of IIT Roorkee, making their digital stay as seamless as possible.

Why a college campus needs a digital Noticeboard?

Notices on a digital platform are quick and easy to access, reduce a lot of paper waste, and one can get notified about the uploads.

The Noticeboard App for IIT Roorkee was first designed and developed in 2011 after that numerous features were added, which complicated the navigation, and the visuals got outdated.

In 2019 the revamping of the college intranet portal was started by IMG with the main aim of updating the tech stack, enhance user experience and to open source the portal to make it open towards contributions from the community.

Omniport can be customized to use by any institute.

Design Process

It is crucial to understand users before you start building a solution for them. At IMG, we make sure that every product satisfies the end-users. Research methods always depend on the project; here are the processes I followed for Noticeboard.

Understanding Users

Noticeboard is used by all the students as well as faculties, deans, director and sometimes staff.

Users can be divided into two major cohorts:

• Students (B.Tech, M.Tech and Ph.D.’s)
• Admins ( Faculties, Deans, Director, and others)

I made around 15 students use the app by assigning them a goal to achieve, for example, finding the notices uploaded by the Electrical Department and observed them to know the pain points.

I also interviewed some people to know about their problems and what else they need. Some of the interview questions were:

• Tell me about your typical day at college?
• How do you stay updated about the things happening in college?
• With internship season going on, how do you keep an eye on the test timings and interview schedules?
• Did you ever felt need to look for a notice posted on a specific day?
• What problems did you face in searching or filtering a notice?

We also checked the Google playstore reviews to know the pain points users had.

This web app also has an admin side( for uploading notices; the professors, deans, and office secretaries have the access).

After a few discussions with stakeholders ( Deans and Directors ), I realized the need for “Important Notices” in the product which will be a high priority notices with compulsory notification.

User Goals:

• View the notices uploaded by different authorities.
• To get regularly notified with notice updates.
• Look for a particular type of notice easily.
• Share notifications among colleagues.

User Frustrations:

• A large number of unnecessary notifications.
• No option for sharing the notice from the app.
• Users cannot look for a notice posted on a particular date.

Insights from User Research

The interviews and reviews help a lot in finding out the user goals and problems; the following are the insights I drew from the research.

Proposed User Flow

The user flow helped me check the continuity of the product, and it allowed the developer to get started with the backend while I utilized that time to work on the wireframes and mockups.

User Flows

Wireframes and Iterations

At IMG, we use Github Issues (How to use Github Issues) to keep track of all the work, and it also helps in the documentation.

Noticeboard web app Issue

I do the iterative process of the product at this stage. Wireframes have the essential elements only, and hence it is easy to make any changes.

You will see later in the article that this solution got changed quite a bit.

Proposed Solution

After doing the required changes, I made the mockups of what the developed product will look like. Components of Semantic UI were used to make all the apps consistent with each other. Also, making web apps mobile responsive is much easier using Semantic components.

Admin Side

For admins most of the functionalities are the same with an addition of the upload function.
Admins can upload notices in various categories where the director and deans can mark notices important as well.

What I learned

Working on Noticeboard, an app that is having an impact on 10k users in IIT Roorkee was a task of huge responsibility where not only I had to design solutions but also work with developers to make sure it is implemented properly. Through this semester-long process, I learned a lot, here are a few key learnings listed:

• Analyzing qualitative data: There is a difference between user needs and wants, people always ask for what they want not what they need. This I experienced when we had a meeting with deans and directors, they wanted to have a separate design for high priority notices but we analyzed they only needed a way to reach all audiences.
• Maintaining iterations: Iterations really help while discussing solutions with stakeholders, git really helped in this.
• Working with developers: It is really important to make sure your designs are implemented properly and there are no differences between design and final product.

Thank you for reading :)