Macquarie University Current Students Website Project

Research

I provided UX Research support for the Current Students Website Project – which was a full website redesign of the Macquarie Student Portal website.

The first part of this project for me was the analysis of user survey data. Over the last few years, students have been providing their feedback (by submitting a survey) regarding why they used the Student Portal website and what they thought about the experience. Using Excel, Dovetail, and Trello – I was able to group their qualitative and quantitative responses (for the 2018 to 2019 time period) to create an idea of what the general consensus was for the website.

The next step was to conduct competitive analysis research of other university websites. This involved looking at other websites – for universities within Australia and in other countries – and finding features they use that could potentially help improve the user experience of the Macquarie Student Portal website. A PDF is available to read through if you are interested in what I looked at.

Macqaurie University also employed 50 students to conduct research tasks as Student UX Assistants. The research tasks given to the students include a review of other university websites, as well as a review of news and events content found on a variety of websites. I thoroughly enjoyed reading through and synthesising their responses to find out what these students want to see on their student portal.

Wireframes and Mock-ups

Macquarie University (MQ) has a design system called GEM – Global Experience Macquarie. I became involved with creating the wireframes and mock-ups for the news and events pages.

My goal was to determine what content would be relevant based on the qualitative, quantitative, and competitive analysis research – while also following the MQ design system provided in GEM.

Based on the research, the following features made their way into the mock-ups below: