Prime Digital Academy is a non-traditional academic institution that offers full-time immersive education programs to adults who are career-switching into tech.

The Challenge - Prime Portal

Prime staff and faculty use a program known as “The Portal” which is a customized repository for applicants, student admissions, student cohorts, assignments, feedback, job placement, history and alumni info. I evaluated Prime Portal to get a sense of workflow, how it is utilized, and to increase usability, improve feedback & navigation.

Cognitive Walkthrough

The first task was to understand for myself how the Prime Staff might use the Prime Portal. To take a tour through it as if I were a staff, and go through a few real-world scenarios. How easy was it to locate student info, assignments, and find data on alumni, such as cohort they graduated from, and current job status.

After familiarizing myself with the Beta Portal, next task was to put an interview together with the staff that use the Prime Portal frequently. The goals were to…

• Gain insights around the context in which users are interacting with the portal.

• Evaluating the director and employer tasks they wish to accomplish. 

• Better understand how much time is spent on the portal by different users.

• Learn about the outside resources being used to fill the gaps in the current system.

• Learn about any additional features missing they would like to see in the portal.

Research findings & prototype plan

During the interview process we asked questions to get key findings and gather as much info as possible from their point of view. We learned what worked, what didn’t, we recorded quotes, functional pain points, and gaps in knowledge along with our own “Aha” moments.

“The Beta Portal separates all of the data and it’s all kind of hard to use”

-Director of UX Instruction

​"Nothing in the portal triggers that the action is done"

-Director of Employer Partnerships

Interactive Prototype

With the data and info gathered, it was time to synthesize that data and come up with a focus point. What were the key takeaways? What key functions were missing, and what was achievable within the time frame? This provided a path to begin prototyping. Sketch was utilized to create prototypes using the synthesized takeaways,

Here are examples of wireframes I designed in Sketch…

InVision Tour

After the Sketch frames had been tweaked and finalized, they were uploaded to InVision where I created a step-by-step tour of the proposed changes specific to the Beta Portal, along with the research work done and rationale behind the proposed changes.