Ellucian Unified Portal by Christian Larsen at Coroflot.com

Ellucian Unified Portal

Ellucian Unified Portal from Christian Larsen

Ellucian Unified Portal

Ellucian Portal is a higher education portal that simplifies information exchange for students, faculty, and staff by giving them a single, entry point to a university's intraweb. Built on SharePoint, this product combines two existing portal offerings to simplify administration and maintenance for Ellucian's customers so it was important, from a design perspective, to maintain a level of consistency between the merged products.

My role on this project was to explore and define the layouts across devices (responsiveness), test these layouts with customers, and render the wireframes and visual design for each widgets as well as the product as a whole. I built a prototype in Bootstrap to see which responsive layouts work best; wireframes and visuals in Adobe Illustrator.

University portals are the entry point for life on campus. It's where they get their news, tools, and any other kind of resource that help students stay informed. Ellucian want to freshen up the existing portal product and modernize it's look and feel and underlying technology.

RESEARCHING PROBLEM: To better understand how we could improve Ellucian's portal solution, we did some competitive market research, solicited feedback from field consultants to better understand our customer's needs, and conducted individual surveys with our SME panel, who later were also involved with the reviewing our progress.

In this project, the project manager had done the user research and a loose set of requirement definitions beforehand in the form of user stories that I used as design requirements for the project. Since this was a merger of two existing products, it was key to balance a new "refreshed" experience with the familiarity of the old.

After a good few weeks of training on SharePoint 2015 and general ramping up for the project, I used Twitter Bootstrap to explore some responsive solutions in a quick and dirty HTML prototype. I looked at various solutions to how this could sensibly react to different device sizes, and which layout lent itself best to content consumption including a list view, a single column, a grid of icons, and live grid tiles. These prototypes were shown to our customers at Ellucian Live, an annual customer conference.

Once we got a feel for the basic layout and behavior, I started to explore a variety of layout improvements for the core set of 15 widgets. The design was to maintain a familiarity to the previous product while taking advantage of the benefits offered to us in SharePoint 2015's environment. These were reviewed with customers and the team on a weekly basis.

Wireframes exploring an event calendar. This tracked daily events on campus.

I would prepare various options to show to the team and to our customer panel. Pros and cons were discussed and then I'd adjust the designs to reflect their feedback.

Since our development team was located around the world, and I was a lone designer working at home, specs were an important part of proper implementation.

Our research showed that students would be using this portal from a variety of devices like mobile devices, laptops, kiosks on campus, etc...so designing for a variety of resolutions was key to a successful solution.