MySCAD Portal Redesign
Student Project
Revolutionizing SCAD's Student Portal Experience
Duration
10 weeks
Team
Tan Tan Nguyen
Arden Hanks
Kenzie Alderson
Tools
Figma
Excel
Notion
My Roles
UI Designer
User Testing Manager
Overview
Every day, hundreds of SCAD students rely on the MySCAD portal to access essential student resources and applications. Despite its importance, the portal is infamous for its frustrating user interface, confusing information architecture, and lack of curated content.
Our team sought to redesign the Desktop portal by conducting rounds of standardized user testing, to identify key issues and redesign high-severity tasks and workflows.
At a Glance
Less Cluttered, More Creative
Introducing a brand new visual overhaul, MySCAD finally looks like a platform used by design students.
Refreshed visual design
By completely overhauling MySCAD's interface, we modernized the portal's look and feel while enhancing functionality.
Discovery
Heavily Used, Heavily Neglected
Everything a SCAD student might need
MySCAD is the hub for every relevant link a SCAD student may need to interact with. From course registrations to finding student deals, there’s a massive amount of information accessible to students.
A good old site audit
These early stages were important for taking inventory of everything the portal has to offer, from the most used links, to features we didn't even know existed.
Prioritizing our redesign goals
It was glaringly obvious that this redesign project was going to be more than a visual facelift. With dozens of different jobs to be done, we reached out to students to identify the most frequent tasks to build our testing plan.
User Testing
Testing The Existing System
Building our user tests
We established clear objectives for our user tests to ensure that we were gathering actionable insights into user behaviors, frustrations, and high severity issues.
The tests, and the (poor) results
All 6 of our students went through the same 30 minute user test, where we asked them to complete specific tasks and locate links across mySCAD. The results were disappointing, but we knew that we had our work cut out for us.
Observed behaviors
The bottom line was that even our seniors struggled to find links across the website, even ones that were frequently visited. This highlights the outdated navigation pattern and the difficulty students had looking through walls of links
Design
Revolutionizing MySCAD
Style guide
Compared to the rest of SCAD's student-facing websites, MySCAD looked old—really old. We combined SCAD's vibrant marketing touch points alongside modern dashboard UI references (thanks Cosmos) to create a cohesive mood board.
Addressing Key Issues
We started with crazy-8 sessions to sketch primary screens and interactions. From these sketches we moved to mid-fi screens, narrowing down our information architecture and copywriting.
Getting the simple wins
Search bar. From the bottom of the page to the top. Sometimes it's all about the little things.
Quick Links
From the depths of the resources page, we tucked quick links into the bottom of the side navigation, making it always visible for students to let them quickly access what they need.
Visual Refresh
With a completely new design system, MySCAD began to look like it could actually be fun to use.
Personalize your home page
The new home page surfaces key information from other links across the website, and allows for students to set custom widgets to curate their MySCAD experience.
Concept Validation
Testing Our Redesign
Final validation
Sure, the new screens look pretty, but did we solve the core issues that the existing portal had? Yes, yes we did.
A big win for students across campus
These results were overwhelmingly positive and showed our redesign was effective! Students loved the updated visuals— and asked when the launch date was.
What Did We Learn?
Good documentation saves a lot of headache
Keeping tidy files, testing notes, and a well structured calendar helped the team stay organized through every step of the project.
Don't feel like you have to solve everything
With only 10 weeks to research, test, design, and refine, we felt overwhelmed by the number of issues we uncovered within MySCAD. We learned to prioritize the most impactful problems, understanding that solving key issues first leads to meaningful progress, even if some problems are left for later.
Thanks for Reading!
Check out more of my projects, or reach out if you want to learn more about this one!
