• Conducted an analysis on the existing courseware platform of IIT Roorkee (Study Portal) and marked out the scopes of improvement.
• Redseigned the platform keeping all the pain points in mind.
• Incorporated new features and possiblities in the design.

• SDSLabs is a student-run technical group at IIT Roorkee. Designers and Developers collaborate together to create products for student community of IITR.
• We ideate, create and develop innovative solutions for the students at IITR.
• As a UI/UX designer, my responsibility is to convert those ideas into meaningful designs and hence converting them into deployable products by working closely with developers.
• We conduct lectures on product thinking, design processes and methods, human-computer interaction for those who are new to the field of User Experience Design.

• Study Portal is a platform for the students of IITR which allows them to upload files to courses that are taught in IITR.
• These files can be professor’s handouts, practical manuals, tutorial solutions, class notes etc.
• A student can share courseware files and even request them. He/she can even request a course, trace its request’s status and can have a personalized window of his/her course.
• There had existed a Study Portal before however, it demanded a redesign for reasons discussed below

• The existing solution was designed in keeping time constraints in mind, hence no proper thought was given to the experience. Therefore, it was necessary to reimagine the concept keeping in mind to provide a seamless and easy experience.
• The flow was flawed, didn’t seem to cover all possible user cases. The website had no means by which a user could trace his/her path. Along with this for a user to find files was not that easy, files were categorized only on the basis of its course but not type.
• A problem was faced by the Request and Upload section. The section had too much copy and less functionality. There was no proper mechanism by which a user could track their request and uploads. It looked confusing at times.
• Being a content heavy platform the current design didn’t have a proper hierarchy of text. The weights, positioning, margins all were same for all types of content.

• The students have enough tech knowledge i.e., they are enough capable to understand some basic elements of a website like icons, differentiating a hypertext with a normal text.
• Based on the data provided by the developers ( of the pre-existing study portal) I was able to deduce that features like Request and Upload were actively used by people.
  Around 35-40 reqeusts / uploads per month
• Study Portal was mostly used by students to find tutorials and their solutions because they were the most requested files.
• Users also reported that they found more difficulty in navigating through content.

The following journey can be referred assuming it to cover almost all of the user scenarios

• This stage involved converting hand drawn concepts into digital copies.
• Ideating and iterating over features like My Course, Activity Log and Uploads.
• I used Whimsical as a tool for delivering the wireframes.Some of those important concepts are presented here.
  
  

• The project was my first encounter with building a product for a real-life audience, as the only designing that I have done till then was either making of random posters or concept projects.
• I learnt what is design thinking and how it can be used to design experiences that are seamless and easy to interpret
• Worked for the first time with a team of developers. Hence got exposure to web-development.
• Learnt how important is user experience when designing flows like these. How important it is to create designs that should match with the goals of the user.