Challenge: Discover the pain points, likes, and dislikes, of VHL Central users, including instructors and students.

Background: VHL Central will be undergoing a complete user experience and user interface overhaul. Currently, the experience has no direction and doesn’t appeal to a user’s first arrival or continued use of the product. The design of the elements on the page creates a hierarchy that doesn’t fit the content, and there is also no appeal to the user as a person and their connection to the Vista Higher Learning brand.

Process: Because the user is the most important element of any product, I began by conducting user research in the form of one-on-one user interviews with many instructors and students. For this project it was a challenge to recruit users outside of the few faculty consultants that VHL typically relied on for product feedback. I wanted to reach a wider audience, with a mix of demographics to conduct non-biased heuristic research. Reaching college students was especially a challenge due to low response and follow through rate with scheduling and completing interviews, despite the compensation we were offering.

Implementation: Seven interviews were completed with instructors at 4 year-colleges, community colleges, middle schools, and high schools. I was able to gather insights into how they felt using the VHL Central platform, on what they liked and where they had issues. I also gained insight into how they felt working with their students.

Five interviews with higher ed students (first year, adult and traditional learners) in remote and in-person classes, with foreign language as an elective or as part of a major, were also completed. I was able to gather qualitative insights which were very helpful, and will be a major focus on how VHL plans to improve their products moving forward.

Results of the interviews were sorted into affinity diagrams, and then into a full presentation that was delivered to the internal stakeholders who will be working on the M4 project.