Enhancing Usability for PeopleGrove's Learning Platform

PeopleGrove's objective is to improve the usability and accessibility of its Experiential Learning platform, using feedback from the students who actually use it. The platform is where students discover internships, fellowships, scholarships, and capstone projects. PeopleGrove wants the friction in that experience identified and translated into concrete design artifacts: a user persona, an empathy map, a user journey map, and a mobile wireframe demonstrating how core interactions adapt to a smaller screen.

Review the Project Summary and Getting Started documentation to confirm scope and expectations.

Audit the existing Dashboard, Search, My Opportunities, and Interests screens, as well as the Student Projects portal.

Plan to recruit three WGU students with access to the Experiential Learning platform.

Write a task-based interview plan that covers the primary flows and includes open-ended follow-ups.

Create the user persona based on students' goals, behaviors, frustrations, and needs.

Observe users interacting with the platform, recording direct quotes and points of hesitation.

Synthesize observations into prioritized insights.

Create an empathy map across says, thinks, does, feels, and needs.

Create a user journey map that annotates actions, thoughts, emotions, and pain points at each stage, and identifies emotional low points.

Design a low-fidelity mobile wireframe addressing the high-priority pain points.

Document the design rationale.

PeopleGrove's brief asks for improvements informed by student feedback. The initial audit will help to guide interviews and testing sessions. The persona provides PeopleGrove with a base user archetype to design for, while the empathy map will surface the emotional and cognitive layers behind observed behavior. The journey map will help with prioritizing the most needed features. Finally, the wireframe allows the research to lead to testable prototypes. On handoff, the PeopleGrove can act on this work, testing and validating before implementation.

Guided onboarding added structure to how a student first encounters the dashboard. The search screen should show thousands of results, many of which are unrelated to the student's major. The interest screen similarly presented options that didn't reduce the number of opportunities when interacted with. It was just one huge database. I chose to implement an onboarding-style category picker so that the results are immediately more relevant upon search. Also, upon selecting an interest, the home screen content is now curated to that interest. It manages cognitive load by filtering unnecessary content.

In the audit, I found that UI meaning was conveyed through color and unlabeled icons throughout the product. For example, opportunity cards use a blue tag, red and green calendars, and a pink location pin with no text labels. The heart, document, checkmark, and flag icons appear on cards but are unlabeled to communicate their meaning. Lastly, subscribing to interests differs from the unsubscribe state only by a small filled dot. Accessibility was something the brief wanted to implement, so referencing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, I made sure icons and color tags were paired with labels. This aids accessibility by ensuring that the same information reaches the widest possible number of students, regardless of user type. But especially for students who fall outside the norm.

The project brief was a little general. It just had a defined list of deliverables, but no problem statement, success metric, or any indication of critical areas to fix. My process was to pick a direction to explore and validate it by auditing the product and using UX research methodologies. I defined my scope to solve the overwhelming experience within the dashboard and search results screens. I conducted a heuristic audit, which helped me frame subsequent research objectives. With the scope set and the audit in hand, I can now start addressing the project deliverables, such as crafting user personas that reflect a working adult student with time constraints for Study at WGU.

To interpret and implement the feedback, I used the observations to create the empathy map and journey map. These helped confirm the biggest blockers and pain points for my target user. Now I had a source of truth to reference when building the wireframes. Paired with my initial scope of solving the overwhelming nature of the current dashboard and search pages, I set out to address those first with an onboarding-style approach, and everything else followed that direction.

Structuring loose briefs into relevant deliverables. With solid planning, I was able to turn a loose brief into deliverables that may be a step toward solving the issues uncovered in the UI. I felt confident in delivering such a practical result based on the skills learned in the program. The journey map, persona, empathy map, and wireframes all feel like a cohesive project that addresses the brief's requirements.

Effective design decision-making. I felt like I effectively identified the problem and used the audit and research as a starting point to inform my design decisions. My design decisions ranged from giving icons and color tags meaning by adding text labels to implementing a category-first entry state to remedy the overwhelming dashboard experience and make it more tailored to the user. High-priority research findings lead to design decisions. A client can act on a specification but cannot act on an observation.

I would like to be more efficient in finding/scheduling testers. Testing is based on other people's availability, which made it my least favorite part of the process. I'm used to everything being done on my own schedule. I would like to better embrace the testing process. I'm sure that with a budget to incentivize potential testers with gift cards, etc., it might be much easier to get this part of the research process moving. Even with proper planning, scheduling, and time management, it would feel like a barrier to completion without a budget to support it.