Interaction redesign at Aalto University

Rethinking how students access information about upcoming assignments

At Aalto University, we use MyCourses for managing course content and assignments. The software is very frustrating — besides constant loading times the design (product and interaction) is very clunky.

For a #6 School of Design you’d think that the internal tool would be better but it seems as if those are often overlooked. There also is no effort to maintain the visual brand of the school for staff-and-student-only services.

I wanted to understand the current interaction design so I made screenshots and abstracted. To view assignment information one currently has to go through several steps to sign in, find the course and locate the specific assignment.

Besides the very cluttered interface, the biggest problems are loading time and remembering where to find information.

It’s difficult to remember what course to click on because all have long names combining several types of information. On the course page you have to remember how the course was setup and where assignments might be placed.

(This was improved a little by an updated sidebar as seen in the screenshots but this sidebar can look drastically different depending on the course.)

For an ideal interaction, the loading time should be reduced but I can’t influence that in this project. Looking at the design, I found a way to drastically reduce the amount of steps needed to find assignment information.

The very clear screens also reduce interaction time by making information easier to find. The users now doesn’t have to spend valuable seconds trying to remember that.

Since Aalto’s Brand mainly exists on websites and documents that are open to the public but doesn’t for internal purposes, I wanted to explore how that might look.

The school has great facilities and branding that I think are a shame not to highlight to its students and staff. This could help improve the study experience and make students and staff feel more connected to the school.

This quick exploration was incredibly fun as I had so many opportunities to reduce complexity while improving the interaction experience.

As always, thanks so much for reading and have a wonderful day!