Course Finder
Filtering Executive Courses
Course Finder
Filtering Executive Courses
Project Overview
The Executive Education program at the Wisconsin School of Business offers a large amount of classes throughout the year. After working with our marketing strategist and performing system design research, we discovered that the user experience while searching for courses was not intuitive and could be improved. I was tasked with the challenge of designing a course finder the program’s users. The course finder needed to allow potential students to search for classes by subject, time, instructor and title.
My Role
I took this project through the entire iterative user-centered design process. I conducted competitive research, qualitative research, created wireframes and designed the visual appearance of the course finder.
Tools
- Balsamiq
- User Interviews
- Adobe Photoshop
The Research Phases
Gathering Requirements
To gather requirements for the project, I met with the directors of the Executive Education program. We had weekly meetings during which we discussed the needs of the course finder, its target audience and the content that needed to be displayed for the courses.
Qualitative Research
I conducted interviews with the Executive Education directors and current Executive Education students. The interviews provided insights into what the students were looking for when deciding on their classes. It also helped me understand how they organized their classes throughout the program.
The Design Phase
Throughout the iterative design process, I created low fidelity wireframes in Balsamiq. I created wireframes for the overall page, the filtering options and the sorting tabs. Through the wireframes I was able to portray the functionality for the various interactive elements. The wireframes breakdown the four sorting tabs:
- Category
- Instructor
- Title
- Time
The Visual Design
I created the visual design for the course finder. The visual design was influenced by the school’s branding and the printed promotional materials and course booklets for the Executive Education program. The color of the courses were determined by the colors used in the booklets to showcases the different subjects. I used various hover effects to help users identify which elements on the page are interactive.
