PT 1: Summary for NJIT’s Pipeline

Objective & Methodology

The study examines NJIT students’ experiences with the Highlander Pipeline’s updated design (Spring 2023) through interviews and usability testing, focusing on navigation, usability, and feature awareness.

Key Findings

Users, particularly seniors, struggle with navigation, lack awareness of features, and experience frustration due to redundant elements and a rigid layout. While the organization improved, customization, mobile responsiveness, and tutorials are needed.

Recommendations & Takeaways

Proposes tutorials for feature awareness, flexible customization, a decluttered interface, and a feedback system to enhance usability and overall student experience.

Introduction

The main focus of this study is targeted towards NJIT students and their usage of the NJIT Highlander Pipeline, which is the “headquarters” of all the school provides. My team’s interviews pertained to the Pipeline’s newest design, which was updated by the end of Spring 2023; the interviewees are demographically from Juniors to above, which means they have seen the old face of the Pipeline before the update. Since my research team and I are also NJIT students, we want to find a pattern and observe how the user experience can be improved for students utilizing the Highlander Pipeline, we focused on the following questions:

• How can the NJIT Highlander Pipeline be used to the fullest potential for you?
  1. What features are the most beneficial in your daily routine and what challenges did you face the most?

• How do you feel when you navigate through the NJIT Highlander Pipeline?
  1. What can be improved about the usability for effective usage, by design and experience?

Method

Participant

The recruitment was an easy process; there were 4 students in the team, who interviewed one other student individually. The participant that I have selected has been at NJIT for more than 4 years and has often been opinionated of the Highlander Pipeline’s navigation; for this reason, this was taken as a perfect opportunity to interview the participant to give a thorough dive-in of the school’s platform.  The Participant in this study is a 21-year-old Egyptian Male. He is a full-time student, a senior, on his last semester of earning his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

Data Collection

To delve further into the enhancement and observe the feelings and roots of the issue of the Pipeline for the students, we came up with 23 questions, which was sectioned in 6 categories: introductory, navigation/usability, organization, aesthetics, functionality, and closing questions. Each category required an overall satisfaction rating, in their opinion.

The introductory questions were kept general as an “icebreaker” to get the participant thinking; after the demographics, we wanted to know how the usage of technology impacted their academic life to understand the user better, how they use the NJIT Highlander Pipeline in a daily basis,  and their general likings and dislikings of the application. The navigation/usability required interaction with the application, where they answered questions about their initial emotions, what tasks are used to accomplish their goals, the new organization of the white boxes, the obstacles they faced, and how they overcame them. The organization portion pertained to the bookmark feature and if the groupings of the content made sense to them. The aesthetics questions were kept light, however, we wanted to know if any of the users had any visual impairments that could limit their experience and the appeal of the visuals. The functionality gave participants the chance to describe what they wished the Pipeline included, opinions on the integration of NJIT with external tools, as well as, how they would design an ideal Pipeline for efficiency and a user-friendly interface. The closing questions were to understand how the current NJIT Highlander Pipeline impacted the student academically, the convenience, and a chance to tell us what questions we should have asked and any additional comments.

As for the interview, the process was seamless and the participant gave well-thought-out responses for each of the questions and the subquestions; the participant’s feedback seems to gravitate more toward a “frustrated” level on most of the categories, however, there were more positive comments on the organization and the aesthetic of the application. As an interviewer, I avoided any biased and opinionated comments from myself. The reactions and emotions spoke volumes during the interactive task; while the procedure was effortless, additional questions needed to be asked for clarification, and features the participant was not aware of.

Data Analysis

For the audio recording, the Google recorder was utilized on the Pixel 4a. With the recording comes the transcription feature, which highlights the words as they are spoken. Details like filler words are also captured, however, the transcription document came in bulk, thus every segment was checked for accurate transcription and separated by names and colors for visual ease. Additionally, the thematic analysis was done using comments

Findings

The analysis revealed the complex relationship between the respondent and the Highlander Pipeline. Some themes include usability challenges, awareness and usage of some features, navigation complexity, evaluation of the layout, limited flexibility, user experience enhancements, and overall impact on academic life.

The NJIT Pipeline’s unfamiliarity welcomes fear of removals and accidental clicking.

Since the respondent is a senior, he utilizes the Pipeline for Degreeworks and registration, since he is actively registering for classes in the winter and summer, in which he emphasizes “the rest, I'm just not familiar with.” The participant does not use other features due to the lack of awareness of the rest of the applications sectioned in the boxes and not understanding the use of them. For example, the user did not care to know the use of the bookmark feature. A tutorial for each update would come in handy, especially for newcomers. Even as a senior he mentions being scared of playing around with a feature in case of, “removing something. I don't even know if it's important or not.”

The participant was surprised and showed a lot of emotions on the interaction segment, upon discovering more features that were quite excessive and “useless,” as well as the fact that the “Discover” and “Account” pages circles back to some of the same applications on the Home page, which can be quite confusing. He mentions in the quote below of it’s repetitivenes.

“it's just more of an eyesore to me at that point. And then account page, to be separate. I don't think discover an account page should lead to the same thing. ” -Participant

Students often want to quickly reach their goal, not become overwhelmed by the vast amount of options right after logging in. For this reason, the participant makes an effort to remember the location of frequent features to avoid wasting any time: “that's kind of why I memorize it as much as I can.” On the contrary, a “quick access” bar would be easier. On top of that, since he primarily utilizes his phone, the responsive layout is terrible, since the Pipeline is primarily for computers.

Although the white boxes are organized, it does not seem user-friendly or flexible to the student; the boxes of the category has to be bookmarked, rather than individually. In addition to that, he would have to try to remember what section the page that he wants to go to. Although the participant heavily emphasizes the “frustrations” and “annoyance” of the usability of the Pipeline, he mentions a few times that he liked the improved overall organization:

“Just adjusting to the new update becomes daunting but the way they have it set up now, the organization I like it a lot.” - Participant

With no visual impairments with colors or the fonts, he shows little concern in the aesthetics, however due to the update from the old Pipeline, he mentions that “when you open it, its a little less depressing” at the very least. NJIT developers were quite considerate of adding the feature with current class information. The participant was given the chance to envision how an ideal NJIT Pipeline would look. If he could redesign it, he would make it more customizable and bring in more flexibility.

Limitations

The overall interview geared towards criticism of the application, thus there should have been a better balance with the pros and cons; in other words, there was not much comprehensive understanding of the user experience. If this interview was repeated, firstly, I would have let the partiticpant walk me through of the features they are aware of and encourage suggestions for improvement; from this knowledge and noting down the emotions, I would probe deeper into the responses. There should have been more open ended questions to let the interviewee give answers freely; for this reason, some of the interview questions were repetitive. The psychology was tough to understand; the user was struggling to express his emotions and kept using redundant language, which at least, helped identify the core issues.

Takeaways

The goal was to understand the user’s psychology of how they feel of the applications and demonstrate what layout and features of the NJIT Highlander Pipeline and the registration system and how it would best suit their effectiveness of usage. One of the best technique to analyze was when the participant was given the task to interact with the Pipeline and walkthrough their reactions and comments, while navigating it. They were learning of features they were not aware of while interacting with the Pipeline.

The study revealed insights of the participant’s overall user frustration with the current Pipeline. The low feature awareness brought in difficult navigation and to utilize it in the fullest potential. With the criticism, the participant is dissatisfied with the current usability–even of the update. The user interface made the pages look aesthetically pleasing, but the actual design did not bring ease to the experience. The input highlighted the vitality to have tutorials on features for awareness, flexible customization, declutter of the abundant features, and a feature to give feedback to the developers, where the data collected can be implemented to the application for an improved usability.

Sources

PT 2: Summary for NJIT’s Registration System in Pipeline

Objective

The project aimed to identify challenges in NJIT's online registration system and propose improvements to enhance user experience, accessibility, and efficiency through surveys and focus groups.

Findings

Students reported technical issues (crashes, slow loading times), lack of real-time updates, difficulty identifying registration holds, and poor mobile accessibility, leading to frustration during registration.

Recommendations

Suggested IT infrastructure upgrades, real-time registration status updates, improved communication on holds and prerequisites, and better academic support services to streamline the registration process