CICSE Board | A UX/UI Case Study
Disclaimer: This project is not affiliated with the official website/organization of The Council For The Indian School Certificate Examination. This case study is purely for educational purposes only. This is just a concept our team (Mrudula Sawant and I) did under the guidance of our mentor Abhrojit Boral. All Images are taken from the Council’s Website or the website of schools affiliate to the Council unless mentioned otherwise.
BRIEF
Our brief was to observe and analyse the CICSE website and it’s users to eventually be able to come up with recommendations and suggestions for a smoother User Experience.
CICSE- Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination
The Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) is an examination conducted by the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination, a private board of secondary education in India.
The Council has been so constituted as to secure suitable representation of: Government of India, State Governments/Union Territories in which there are Schools affiliated to the Council, the Inter-State Board for Anglo-Indian Education, the Association of Indian Universities, the Association of Heads of Anglo-Indian Schools, the Indian Public Schools’ Conference, the Association of Schools for the ISC Examination and members co-opted by the Executive Committee of the Council.
RESEARCH & OBSERVATIONS
MISSION
The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations is committed to serving the nation’s children, through high quality educational endeavours, empowering them to contribute towards a humane, just and pluralistic society, promoting introspective living, by creating exciting learning opportunities, with a commitment to excellence.
THE ETHOS OF THE COUNCIL
- Trust and fair play.
- Minimum monitoring.
- Allowing schools to evolve own niche.
- Catering to the needs of the children.
- Giving freedom to experiment with new ideas and practices.
- Diversity and plurality — the basic strength for evolution of ideas.
- Schools to motivate pupils towards the cultivation of:
- Schools to have an ‘Indian Ethos’, strong roots in the national psyche and be sensitive to national aspirations.
STAKEHOLDERS & THEIR NEEDS
The Council
- Clear and direct communication to anyone affiliated
Affiliated schools
- Regular and accurate updates regarding policies and examinations
Teachers
- Expected deliverable from the board
Students
- Results, updates, syllabus
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
It’s hard to pin-point any competitors for the ICSE board and its website because it is essentially for informational purposes and non-profit. In a way it has a monopoly because anyone giving any examination under this board has only one site to go to. However, in terms of comparison, It can be compared to: http://cbse.nic.in/, https://www.ibo.org/benefits/
- CBSE website
- Customization for all users
- Header allows you to skip to main content
2. IB website
- better information flow and hierarchy
- personalized corner for every IB user
Another competitor per say can be other educational websites that are often more effective in conveying important messages and notifications relating to the exams such as: https://www.shiksha.com/, https://www.jagranjosh.com/
ANALYZING NEED OF BRAND VS. CUSTOMER
Need of the brand
- The aim, vision and mission of the board is understood by the people
- Showcase how they are different from other educational board
Need of the customer
- Curriculum — syllabus, examinations, teaching strategy, activities etc
- Facilities they provide
- Brief about the board
- Contact details
- Policies of the board
- Results
CUSTOMER CLUSTERS
- Students
- School
- Parents
- Teachers
CUSTOMER SURVEY
Student Responses
Parent Responses
Teacher Responses
School Admin Responses
EXISTING INTERFACE
S.W.O.T. ANALYSIS
The CICSE board website (due to the lack of proper competitors and monetary gain) has quite a few strengths and shortcomings.
Strengths
- sticky for results
- notice board for important notification
Weaknesses
- too crowded
- hard to navigate through
- has no information hierarchy
- hard to contact through website
Opportunities
- become more teacher and school friendly
- regularly update and notify users about important news to avoid rumours
- cleaner segregation of information
Threats
- Fake news and rumors regarding important examinations
OUR TAKE ON THE WEBSITE
SUGGESTED CHANGES
- Personal account for Student, Teacher and School administration
Upon research, we found that the website is hard to navigate through and it is difficult to find information relevant to the user due to the multiple clusters of users. An effective solution to this problem is being able to log in to a personal account that has information relevant only to that particular user.
So for students, only data related to subjects that they have opted for shows up so that they don’t have to go scouting for this information throughout the website. For teachers also, only data related to the subjects they teach shows up. And the school administration has access to student information that is necessary for the registration and other formalities.
- More suitable segregation of information for categories
While looking through the website we found that there was a lot of repetitive information in ambiguous places so we decided to avoid unnecessary repetition and place data in a better way.
Eg. In the current website, there were many unrelated PDFs like- forms, past question papers, curriculum etc, under the category ‘downloads’. We put these under their respective categories of curriculum, forms, and students and teachers personal accounts where we thought it would be more relevant and accessible.
- More suitable names for categories
We changed or removed certain categories that were named ambiguously eg. divisions and downloads.
- Design Changes
Design-wise, the website appeared to have too many unnecessary colours, boxes and inconsistencies which we attempted to rectify
INFORMATION HIERARCHY
SITE MAP
ROUGH WIREFRAMES
FINAL WIREFRAMES
STYLE GUIDE
UX FRAMES
PROTOTYPE OVERVIEW
PROTOTYPE
TEAM
Working on this project was a great learning experience. It taught me a lot about UI and UX. It was a pleasure working with my partner Mrudula Sawant. I would also like to express my gratitude to our mentor Abhrojit Boral.
