goSFU Reimagined

We started our research by identifying the problems found within goSFU’s interface in accordance to HCI principles; accordances, memory overload, and intellgence.

Contibution: Background Research

The affordance here allows users to print out key pages and information, but there is no signifier to indicate that it actually does that.

The back button at first goes to the student centre which makes people think it is a home back button, BUT it actually changes depending on the flow of pages you go.

The course cart text is confusing for returning students. It creates clutter and forces the students to spend more time reading carefully in order to not get confused.

goSFU does not follow SFU’s branding guidelines or identity. We found that this was a major part of the SFU experience and wanted to capture the feel of an SFU application.

Contibution: Figma Prototyping and refinement

I broke the original site layout into sections using that as a baseline to position elements, however I quickly realised that the layout of the original website was problematic and would not serve as a good starting point.

My second attempt was a full layout restructure, taking elements from other student portals and organisation programs.

Developing this idea further as a group, we landed on a layout that was structured, and simple enough to avoid the issues we laid out in the beginning.

Staff and students are always on the move and require access to goSFU wherever they are. The old layout was completely broken on mobile, so we created mobile versions of our new design to counteract this.

Gaining background research on users and clearly identifying a problem is crucial to developing a design. We used HCI to define the issues and framed them with terminology that could be further analysed. I learned to be able to step back, and reassess the situation asking myself “is this design going to answer our questions?”