Re-imagining the NIFT App & Website

Introduction

My college — NIFT — has 16 centers across the country and houses 10,000+ students who are all digitally connected to the college via the Campus Management Solution website (or CMS). This website lets the student check their marks, choose elective subjects, see results, view timetables, book hostel rooms and access other reports that are related to the college.

Some of the above features — marks, attendance, timetable, assignments, placements and fees — which are the most used features of the CMS make up the NIFT Student App.

The CMS account is accessed daily by 59% of students.

So, I decided to do a project to re-imagine the CMS website and the NIFT Student App and make its experience more in tune with what the students need.

Current Student App and CMS Website

Current CMS website

Current NIFT Student App

My initial questions were:

• What are the immediate aspirations of the students?
• How do students in different campuses use CMS? Or do they rely on info relayed to them by notices, emails, etc.

Preliminary brainstorming

• The NIFT CMS portal(web) is used extensively by the students but its IA is complicated.
• NIFT has a strict attendance policy — so students need to know constantly if they are falling short of attendance in a particular class.
• A minimum of 5 clicks are required to access the attendance report or marks which is one of the main reasons people access CMS. This number can be reduced.
• There is no ‘stay logged in’ option in the CMS website.

Initial Brainstorming

Unused features in CMS

Current audience that I am looking at is only from NIFT Hyderabad (majorly from my class) which is not optimal. For example, in my course, the timetable changes weekly (and I would like to be notified when it does) while in some other courses it might not. So it is important to know how all centers work to make the right decisions.

Survey:

I decided to interview people from NIFT centres across the country to make sure if their experience with CMS is similar to mine and my batchmates’ from Hyderabad and find any gaps that may be existing in their experience with CMS.

You can find the Google Survey here.

Clippings from the survey

The frequency of accessing the CMS website justifies a feature heavy app as opposed to the current app with minimal features.

Persona Mapping:

I decided to come up with user personas inspired by the data I collected so that I can map their journeys.

Persona I

Name: Anju
Age: 19 (1st Year)
Personality: Hardworker, Curious, Explorer
Description:
Anju is a cheerful girl who revels in her love for design. She is found reading books in the library, watching design tutorials online or in classes. She isn’t much about bunking classes just for the heck of it and saves up her attendance to go on trips on long weekends. An organisation freak — she lists out all her submission due dates at the beginning of the semester on her phone apps and likes to tick off each one as it is done. She actively participates in competitions and workshops in the college.

Persona II

Name: Arun
Age: 21 (Final year)
Personality: Very social, lazy about work
Description:
Arun is a people person, he loves to play his guitar in the campus, chill in the canteen and go out with friends. He is habitual to working in the eleventh hour and somehow passes the minimum attendance requirements because his friends drag him to class and/or cover up for him. He likes volunteering and participating in the cultural events in the college.

This exercise helped me to identify features that could be included in the app which would aid the students like a library database search option, announcements of competitions/cultural events in college.

Ideation:

I tracked the kind of interactions that the personas have with the CMS website and also the points at which they interact with the college system to determine where an intervention could be feasible.

Here are a few of the ideas that I came up with:

• Notifications for shortage of attendance (at 9 a.m. - right before class)
• Notifications for the library book return date
• A portal for accessing the database of library contents (the results would also give out the room and the shelf number where the book can be found so that a lot of time can be saved for the students and the library staff)
• Notifications about the competitions/ events in college
• Share presentations and coursework material
• Semester schedules (holidays and final exams)

While listing down the reasons for which the app/CMS is currently used , I saw that it was used only to ‘check’ attendance, marks, timetable, etc. which made me realise — What if the relevant information came to the students directly?

Clippings from sketchbook

After running my initial ideas past prospective users — I came across the following concerns:
“The app cant be too heavy as my phone memory is already full”
“The college wifi signal keeps fluctuating in strength, I wouldn’t want the app to take time to load results”
“The notifications for attendance, etc. sound cool but they shouldn’t become too annoying”
“Feedback forms about the faculty/ scholarship applications are sensitive information that can be misused, so security for that is necessary”

Wireframes:

Explorations for wireframes

After taking into consideration all of the concerns and evaluating the ideas I came up with the following wireframes for the proposed app:

Wireframes

Some of the features are:

• On the attendance page, the total number of sessions left would be given for the student’s convenience.
• Total of marks for each subject would be displayed so that the students would know how much they need to catch up.
• Option for notification alerts would also ask about how much in advance the alert should be sent. Eg: Should submission alert be sent a week in advance or 3 days in advance? Attendance alert should be sent the night before or in the morning before class?
• The pages like scholarship application/feedback form/hostel booking (sensitive information) would be password protected.
• Pages like scholarship application/hostel booking could be directed from the app to the webpage to reduce the size of the app.
• The current ‘birthdays’ option shows the birthdays of different NIFT students/alumni on the particular day only. In the proposed redesign, the app has an option to set reminders for specific teachers’/ students’ birthdays & the website could have a list of all birthdays in the year which could be searched through.

Notifications/Alerts:

I decided to use the benefit that an app has over a website which is — ease in two way interaction with the user.

The notification alert timings can be set by the user. For example, the user will decide if they want attendance shortage notification on the previous night or in the morning before class. Similarly, the notification for submission due date could be set to anything from 7 days in advance to 2 days in advance.

Notification on phone

Restructuring the IA of the website:

Unnecessary clicks and loops in the website structure have been avoided to create a linear flow.

Existing Structure

Proposed Structure

Conclusion:

Having first hand experience of using the CMS website for the past three years and the app for the last few months I believe that the proposed changes would help the students through different processes without any hassle.

I would surely like to take this project forward and work on creating the final look of the app.

NOTE: This is a self-initiated project which was not sponsored by the college.

Check out this project on Behance here.