UCLA

Case Study

Most major social media, entertainment, and streaming media services such as Pandora and Spotify are leveraging artificial intelligence.  Why not education? The University of California, Los Angeles one of worlds leading educational institutions is changing the way education is leveraging technology with Smart Recommendations.  An open source recommendation engine that can map out the student lifecycle and cross reference an individual student’s search history and recommend what they are likely eligible for and raise that content to the top of their recommendations feed when it is most helpful to their academic and professional career.

Process

• Research and Strategy : – Created user personas based on surveys with graduate school students currently attending UCLA, and stakeholder interviews and workshops with Graduate School administration.
• Information Architecture : – Created a sitemap which represented the current gradate school website a long with future pages to be designed and developed. Also created data points diagram to validate personas and relevant data.
• Holistic Design Audit : – Documented already existing user interface components into a coded design system as well a new components.
• Prototype : – Created high fidelity prototypes to review with internal team and handed off to development.

Deliverables

User Personas

Site Map

Recommendation Engine

Design System

Holistic Design Audit

As part of the process a holistic audit was conducted in which all current user interface components were documented and then new design components were then produced.

This card design which is flexible and mobile friendly allowed for a more simple and easy to read design for funding data as displayed below.

Card System

Card systems are widely used due to the fact that they are flexible and can be modified to fit different types of information in a variety of different ways. It is an essential building block for any design system.

Ucla Color Scheme

Branding

Typography

Search Results Page

In the new user flow, when a user views their search results they now have the ability to add to favorites.  The user can also can also choose to hide and to expand the filters if they want to refine their search.