An Study on Uchicago’s Academic Portal Interface Case Study by Non Charoenwattananon
<aside> 💡 This is my Master’s Thesis on the Sociology of Education, looking at how interfaces can impact educational outcomes and redesigning UChicago’s class registration.
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Amongst the student body, The University of Chicago’s class registration portal — my.classes — is renowned for its unintuitive and user-unfriendly interface. However, due to its mandatory function as a pre-registration and class management system, students are forced to put up with my.classes’ badly designed and antiquated interface. Having not been updated (to my knowledge) for at least 7+ years, my.classes is in desperate need of a redesign.
As a joint-degree student school at UChicago, I have experienced the breadth of my.classes’s ups and downs. This, alongside my background in design and product development, makes me uniquely positioned to address the frustrations of both myself and my peers. I embark on the mission to propose a better my.classes.
For my project, I have chosen to follow the Double Diamond design framework: a model for problem-solving popularised by the UK Design Council in 2005. It consists of four parts: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver and follows two diamond shapes in its divergence and convergence.
Fig 1: Double Diamond Design Framework via Wikipedia
The first diamond focuses on identifying the problem, and the second, on creating solutions. The Discover (1) and Develop (3) stages involve divergent thinking, where the goal is to generate as many insights, ideas, and solutions as possible while the Define (2) and Deliver (4) stages involve convergent thinking, where the focus is on selecting the best ideas and refining them into a problem statement or solution. I have chosen the Double Diamond framework for this project as it emphasises the importance of understanding the problem before generating solutions and encourages iteration and refinement throughout the process!
