Design and development of a Learning environment for Taster Courses

Project Overview

Provide a brand new VLE for the University of Greenwich which is easily accessible to non-registered students, intuitive to use and modern and attractive in look and feel.

Deliverables

The output includes producing wireframes and full specifications, personas and user journeys, information architecture, conceptual visual design, front-end implementation and user-testing.

User Profiles

I started looking at potential user profiles of the system based on real data. This activity provided the team with context and motivation regarding goals and behaviours and it helped us to prioritise features and maintain focus on target users.

Joint Workshops

After identifying key demographics I planned brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders, including business and development teams to gather content requirements.

Wireframes

Based on the user journey flow, information architecture and content requirements, I then proceeded to wireframe the interface interactions. The wireframes took into account the devices that we were designing for. I created responsive and interactive wireframes of key pages using Axure.

Conceptual visual designs

Two concepts of visual designs were created using a combination of tools including Axure, Photoshop, Illustrator and InVision. The design concepts were then put to test with key target groups at Greenwich University

User-testing of designs. I also designed an online survey to the target groups to gather quantitative feedback between the two different designs for the Moodle based Taster Course environment. I analysed the results and shared across the wider team.

The designs were iterated based on user feedback

Next Steps

After amending the designs based on user feedback the next step in the process for me was to start development by bringing the design in the browser.

I used the responsive Moodle Bootstrap framework as a base theme to get started. As all base themes, Bootstrap is meant to be built on rather than used 'as is'. I will then be adding Greenwich branding, and all the customisation required and defined earlier in the process.

The team worked in an agile process with a 2-week sprint.v

The new taster courses design and development implementation was launched in June 2016.