Sophia Li.

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The University of Toronto Opportunity Optimizer .

Connecting university students with personalized and recommended opportunities 

Figma

The Opportunity Optimizer

  • Category: Human Factors, User-centered Design
  • Client: The University of Toronto
  • Project date: March 2021

CLNx- A Platform for Experiential Learning

The Co-Curricular Learning Network (CLNx) houses job boards for casual, research, volunteer, work-study, and on/off campus positions. It also provides calendars and registration information for various career exploration events, mentorship opportunities, workshops, and appointments. The users of the system include students, student staff, professional staff, faculty, employers, partners, and recent graduates. This project is aimed at improving the user experience with CLNx.

Helping the Leaders of Tomorrow find their Opportunities Today

The University of Toronto Co-curricular Record (CCR) Opportunity Directory is a virtual space used to organize and facilitate the search for a workstudy, volunteering, club, or off campus opportunity. Opportunities that the students enrol in will thus be shown on the student’s Co-curricular Record, a record that will appear on their transcript when they graduate. Working closely with the University of Toronto, a complete redesign of the directory was done in order to optimize the user experience through hierarchical task analysis and human-centered design heuristics .

 

 

Technologies 

 Figma

 

Deliverables

 Website prototype

 Hierarchical task analysis

 Usability Testing

 Data analytics 

 

 The Co-Curricular Record (CCR) Opportunity Directory contains 1000+ opportunities for students, student staff, professional staff, faculty, employers, partners, and recent graduates 

Phase I: Understand 

Data Collection and design implications

The Challenge  

The UofT Co-Curricular (CCR) website currently serves a large number of users due to its student population and has a diverse portfolio of opportunities that contribute to oversaturated search results.  A new website is needed in order to personalize the opportunity searching experience for each unique individual while solving current issues related to website navigation.

 

 

 

Target Features

 Opportunity Filter

 Keyword Search

 Website Design Aesthetics

 Search Results

 

Data Collection Methods

Direct Observation

Surveying

Existing Documentation

 

Surveying the user target group (n=23) revealing that among those who were searching for a specific opportunity on the website, 54.5% were looking for a WorkStudy position . However, 87% of the users were unable to determine which listings were WorkStudy position . Usability testing within this method also determined that 39.1% of participants took >=5 minutes to search for a single opportunity, with 56.5% of users reporting difficulty in completing this task. Additionally, the users found only 58% of search results (n=5) to be relevant in one task, and 52.1% of the users did not find their overall results to be relevant in another task. Other issues relating to user dissatisfaction include the website’s layout (56.5%) and the filtering system for opportunities (43.4%)

 

 

 


The Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) observed 3 main shortcomings in the existing website, including non-functional and unccessecary features which lead to the generation of 2 design alternatives through a multi-step ideation process

Phase II: Create 

The Opportunity Optimizer

 

The wireframe concept of the website includes 50+ pages containing 3 new features

 

The Opportunity Optimizer is a quiz-style application where the user answers 4 to 5 questions about the type of opportunity they are looking for. The application then displays a list of opportunities that the user may find useful or helpful in ascending order, along with the options of adding the opportunity to a shortlist for convenient viewing and directly applying through the apply button. The user may also view the shortlist, edit a list of opportunity filters, and suggest an opportunity through this screen.

The Opportunity Optimizer 

Personalized recommendations for the modern student

Passionate About Innovation

From multi-stage ideation to wire-frame prototyping, I am passionate about the intersection between technology and innovation and finding optimal solutions to modern day problems.

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