The initial vision was a quick example of what could be. My knowledge of the platform's features, content, and future objectives allowed me to create this quickly.
Below is the new portal, which provides intuitive navigation through grouped content and functionality.
There are two paths in the navigation, so users are always aware. The user has access to global navigation throughout the platform. As the user navigates related objects and other calls to action, affordance-based navigation anticipates their needs. In addition, I incorporated branding into the interface and visuals, making it more modern and educator-friendly. Portal functionality is divided into the following groups -
Global-based Functionality:
Institution Management, User Account Management, Navigation to Platform Applications, Access to Client Care, and Footer.
Application-based Functionality:
Portal Dashboard Navigation
The initial vision covered everything outlined in the request, so I used that as the reference for the first round of object mapping. This map includes everything and the kitchen sink. I also added known gaps in the current product, relevant user feedback requests/issues, plus any other appropriate requests the business had shared with the Product team.
This object map was a quick and messy exercise to establish a comprehensive baseline view to understand the components better and strategize. It can be overwhelming to account for this many objects at once - this exercise was only to establish the priorities and relationships. We could have used stickie notes if we were working in person, but using Trello for this collaboration was helpful for a remote team. Even better, we had a place to document knowns and unknowns that usually get lost or overlooked this early in the project.
Once we identified priorities from the previous "Kitchen Sink Object Map," I started a new object map that addressed only the prioritized objects for the initial release. We moved the relevant content from the other map, re-established relationships for this new map, collected, updated, and documented to ensure current information.
At this point, notifications remained undefined because we were still unsure if this would be part of the release. Also, the Event Calendar was omitted from the map because it is an external link to the corporate marketing calendar.
As I looked at the map, I realized all of the objects had something in common. These are all global objects that should live in the header for easy user access. So I thought by focusing on only the onboarding process that flows to the header and then building out the items that live in it, we could establish the foundation of our new platform with this scalable component.
This plan is simple, which is strategic to minimize the possibility for both scope creep and rework from both a content and integration perspective. We could reasonably deliver this within our timeline, a 90-day window.
The next steps are to complete the object map and to start designing! As a bonus into later phases of this project, I included a few high fidelity pages.