User Experience
After having finished Sprint 3 (web frontend integration), we conducted a User Experience /
User Interface review. To do so, we asked a collection of people from our circle of acquaintances
to navigate through the website and complete various tasks. Additionally, we asked them to provide
feedback for the visual look of the website, along with any additional features that they would
like to see implemented. To ensure that our product was as intuitive as possible, we selected
both people that were familiar with McGill services, and others that were not. None of them had
seen nor interacted with the website before. We only gave them a briefing on the scope of the project,
the basic requirements, and the role of the coop administrator.
- Find a specific (pre-existing in the database) student.
- Find a specific (pre-existing in the database) employer.
- View the forms for a student's coop (whichever student).
- Edit the Acceptance Form submission date of a student's coop (whichever student).
- Generate statistics for a specific semester and interpret them.
- View the Tasks & Workload report of a student by navigating through the employer.
After having conducted our user review, we collected quite a lot of feedback regarding the Visual
aspect, the Functionalities and the Navigation of our website. Here are the main points which stood
out to us:
- Sleek, modern overall look, appreciated unanimously.
- Looks professional and polished.
- Mostly consistent with other viewpoints.
- The color theme does not really match with McGill's visual identity.
- The red text and tables are hard to read over the dark background.
- Could use a bit more visual effects when displaying data. More WOW factor.
- The tabs are intuitive and effective.
- The tables - although they can be overwhelming - provide a good overview of all the data.
- Most functionalities and data (except coops and forms) are easily accessible.
- Forms are hard to find. Everyone struggled with viewing and editing forms.
- Cannot view coops, only students and employers.
- Could use a few instructions/indications to help usage and navigability.
- Router links are hard to distinguish.
- More router links to ease navigation and back-and-forths through data.
- Navigating through data isn't optimized, need a way to search/filter.
- Similarity between navigating through students and through employers can be confusing for novice users.
- The website covers practically all of the requirements.
- Editing the content of forms is a plus.
- Maybe add a way to interact with coops.
- Provide a way to filter through data.
- Stats do not work properly.
- Stats are confusing.
- Stat formats are inadapted.
We changed the color palette to match that of McGill's myCourses: red, white, grey.
We also modified the basic cooperator logo that we had, and changed it to a stylized 'myCoops'
logo which resembles the myCourses logo. We feel that these changes will make users feel more
at home while using a product that looks familiar and consistent with other McGill services.
Text and tables are now black over white or light grey backgrounds, making it significantly easier
to read them.
The progress bar was added, both for functionality and for visual purposes, it adds some 'WOW' factor
while making it easier to see a student's progress through a coop with a quick glance.
We redesigned the navigation of the website, which was flawed. Indeed, it was only possible to see Students,
Employers and Forms, not Coops. We have now opted for a containment architecture, making navigation more intuitive
and continuous: by accessing a specific student from the students tab, the different coops can be viewed. By accessing
a coop from there, the different forms for that coop can be viewed. By accessing a form, its contents can be viewed and
modified. This also holds true for Employers.
We also added help indications to ease navigation and provide assistance to novice users. These are located under
certain tables, buttons and data fields:
Example of helper indication under the table, to access specific coops
We added more router links to make it easier to navigate back-and-forth through data, for example to view a student's specific coop then to go back to the student's coop list. We also fixed a security issue where post-login pages could be accessed without valid login.
Example of router links on the student and employer names
Statistics were not working properly after Sprint 3, we therefore did a redesign, while taking into account the user review feedback. Stats are generated for a specific academic term, and now showcase three stats categories: General stats, incomplete coops and form submission stats:
We fixed the format of the general stats to show whole numbers and decimals when needed, along with displaying the completion index as a percentage. Furthermore, the form submission stats provide insight as to which forms are being returned properly and which ones aren't.
We also added a way to send reminders manually, in addition to the automated reminders which we already had.
Finally, we added a way to filter students and employers by academic term, to see only the ones that are active (currently doing a coop during the specified term). We also added a search feature to look up specific students with their user ID or name:
