The Upgrade: Designed by You, for You

According to the University’s Training and Usability Services team, The PeopleSoft Upgrade program went to great lengths to engage staff, faculty, and students in the design of the upgraded systems.

“Most projects have one or two usability evaluations with less than 10 users per session,” explained Nick Rosencrans, User Experience Analyst. “In contrast, The Upgrade held 11 usability evaluations with more than 150 people during a two-year period.”

Colleagues participate in
Design Thinking Workshops

That’s in addition to early focus groups, design workshops, and hundreds of user acceptance testing sessions. Why such a focus on engaging users? The Upgrade team applied lessons learned from previous efforts, and, as a result, determined that engaging users was critical to launching user-friendly systems that would be successfully adopted.

It started in summer 2012 with focus groups that led to design-thinking workshops. Each time users got together, they explored the possibilities: what would it be like for the U to have a single unified system? Using early prototypes, staff, faculty, and students delivered great insight into how they would like to use the MyU portal, the messaging, reporting tools, and more.

Samples of brainstorm exercises from Design Thinking Workshops