Project Lead
3 UI/UX Designers
User Experience
Wireframing
Prototyping
Interface Design
Figma
Asana
Slack
UIUC’s Gies College of Business hosts experiential learning programs and courses to provide students with real world experience with corporate clients. These programs have grown significantly and as a result, our team was tasked to create a new content management system to connect all stakeholders involved.
This is a project with significant process already made with the majority of user research and initial prototyping already completed. As a result, our team picked it up at the prototype stage where our main task was to understand what had been done so far, define what more needed to be designed for the MVP, then design these screen so that the prototype would be functional.
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Our process began with a whiteboarding session where our team sat down to take a deep dive into what progress had been made in the project so far and what kind of tasks we needed to add. This session determined some of the key places in the site we should begin building off of namely, student profile set up, recruitment, global search feature, among others. This also helped us brainstorm questions for our client at Gies in order to clarify the scope the MVP should cover. Take a look at some ideas and topics we touched on:
As our team worked through protoyping different features, we also made sure to meet with the student leadership team that leads one of the experiential groups at Gies that would be using iControl, Illinois Business Consulting (IBC). This meeting was invaluable as through a series of questions, we were able to understand their side of running the program and therefore what we can do to make iControl as useful to them as possible.
I was tasked with designing how the portal would handle the student recruitment process for these programs. Based on the wants, needs, and resources given by IBC leadership, I was able to put together a seamless way for IBC recruiters to vet applicants.
The biggest pain point for recruiters is that the entire process is run through google docs, sheets, and forms resulting in a large amount of time organizing high volumes of information. The best way to mitigate this was to create a section in the portal to input information about applicants from interviews and have a way to narrow down to a select few.
Due to the high selectivity of the program as well as the ins and outs of the recruitment process being nonpublic, I unfortunately can’t explicitly showcase these designs.
This project was the first time I’d worked with product design and UI/UX processes and I enjoyed it so much that I began considering pursing a career in this field. Throughout the project I found myself investing extra time and energy into understanding and implementing the design process and overall truly enjoying the experience. I thoroughly enjoyed forging a connection with users for which this portal is designed around and revel in the knowledge that there is a direct impact in the work we were doing.