Blackboard Redesign
Description
Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS) is a platform used by many universities to support the process of teaching and learning. Professors can upload notes, assignments, etc. and students can access them. This website was chosen because the current website has a lot of extra features and not all of them are used frequently. It becomes difficult to find the required items quickly and there are also multiple redundancies. Through my redesign, I wanted to address some of these issues and try to make the website easier to navigate. The goal of the project was to analyze the blackboard website using 10 heuristics to find out 10 issues, provide recommendations for them, and demonstrate the changes with the help of a redesign.
Methodology
Heuristics
The 10 heuristics selected were, Flexibility-Usability Trade Off, Thumbnail Grid, List Inlay, Aesthetic-Usability Effect, Feature Search and Browse, Color and Contrast, Corner Treatments, Clarity, Consistency, and Privacy. These heuristics were selected by keeping in mind the problems faced while using blackboard on a regular basis. Explanation about each heuristic can be found in the detailed report linked below.
Redesign
Annotated sketches were created to explain the redesigned elements.
Results
The major findings were, 1 - Too many tools and customization options, 2 – Long lists on multiple pages to display information, and 3 – Privacy of students while posting comments or replies. All three of these issues were addressed in the redesign. Recommendations for the first two findings were explained above. For the 3rd one, there was a checkbox added during replying to posts which asked if the user would like to post anonymously. This would solve the problem of providing constructive criticism anonymously. Overall the website was made more usable by eliminating some of the extra options from each screen and grouping all the infrequently used tools to a separate page. The final prototype was made interactive and can be found here: Blackboard Prototype