UX Designer
Feb. 2023 - Apr. 2023
Figma, Miro, Google Workspace
Albert is the course registration system for New York University (NYU) undergrad and graduate students. The registration process for NYU's Albert is notoriously tricky. Current students typically cite a complicated registration process and unintuitive interface as reasons why. Also, information on Albert is so broken that students usually need to resort to other resources for enrolling in courses.
By redesigning some parts of NYU Albert based on students’ responses, I’d like to make the interface more intuitive and the registration process simple. With the new “my course” feature, students will be able to find information about their requirements and plan their courses directly on Albert.
To better understand how people feel about the current NYU Albert system, I conducted a semi-structured interview with 5 participants. They are current NYU graduate students from different departments.
See affinity mappingIn order to distill the user pain points from the interview, I created the survey for any current NYU students. They are either undergrad or graduate students from different departments.
After the interview and the survey, here are some key findings and insights:
Based on the insights, I plot a list of possible features onto a graph to help narrow down what are crucial elements for change. Three high-priority changes are to show the requirements courses on Albert, revamp the course search filters, and decrease the course registration steps.
From research, I find students are most frustrated about not showing course requirements, the course search, and the course registration process.
improve Albert’s experience in providing course requirements and changing the course search and the registration process?
I boil down the findings into 3 design criteria: customizability, clarity, and smoothness.
Based on the research, I generate 2 personas based on the insights.
The user journey map is created according to the personas:
I did some sketches to develop my ideas for the Albert website redesign.
My focus on Albert is clean and follows the original design system. The color scheme is the same as the current Albert.
In order to test our product, I conducted user observations, think-aloud protocols, surveys, and interviews with 5 participants who are current NYU graduate students. Here is the overview of the research process:
After the interview, I made some changes in my design based on the users’ feedback.
My solution focuses on revamping (1) academics (2) course search filters and (3) course registration process on the current Albert
NYU Information Technology (IT) is the organization that is in charge of Albert. After showing the project to some professors and doing a few more iterations, I may suggest the design to NYU IT to take my idea.
From the interviews and the open-ended question in the survey, people suggest Albert need a more beautiful layout and interface. Current Albert seems a bit bland and looks just like a wireframe. Some colors and designs may be necessary to make the interface more attractive.
