Advising Kiosk
Replacing an outdated vended product with a new system.
Background
Many academic advising offices at Indiana University were using an outdated, vended product or pen and paper forms to manage their waiting rooms of students visiting for advising appointments. The processes were inconsistent between advising offices, oftentimes cumbersome for front desk workers to manage, presented security concerns regarding student data, and wasted valuable time advisors, students, and other academic employees could use to ensure successful advising plans.
The goal was to create a new check-in kiosk system that would better integrate with Indiana University’s existing academic advising systems to provide a more unified system among the various user roles. A successful system would allow students and advisors to focus on upcoming meetings, rather than the management of those meeting schedules, and would allow office administrators to easily track the daily activity of their offices. I started on the project a few weeks after the team began exploring the problem space and acted as sole designer for the rest of the project.
Team Composition
1 Product Owner
1 Business Analyst
4 developers
1 designer (me)
Outcome
The new advising kiosk system:
Offers students a fast, secure process to check-in for advising appointments.
Offers advisors a consolidated application to manage their various types of advising appointments.
Offers office administrators a comprehensive dashboard to manage incoming check-ins.
The Process
When I joined the project, the team had already created some workflow charts detailing how the system we were replacing currently handled the managing of advising appointments, which greatly helped me get up to speed and start thinking through the process with them. I was able to immediately start wireframing ideas to prepare for user testing.
To begin soliciting feedback, we set up a pilot group of about 30 advisors who would begin using a first iteration of the system in their offices. We had consistent communications with this group regarding their experiences, which helped form the first implemented version of the application.
Early sketch for the office administrator check-in process. Feedback from this specific sketch helped organize the flow of the check-in process for students and administrators.
Working from the sketched concepts of the administrator check-in workflow, these wireframes were generated for user testing, team discussion, and accessibility review.
Research
During the pilot launch of the advising kiosk application, we held two rounds of un-moderated usability tests using Loop11. These tests specifically tested the advisor and office administrator views of the application and defined success criteria for each of the four usability tasks. We identified one major pain point that needed to be addressed immediately through this study:
Managing the queue of students waiting to be seen for an appointment required the advisors to constantly refresh the page in order to see new data. These queue management pages needed to auto-update in a way that provided fresh data without constant action.
Although the usability test helped a great deal to understand advisor’s and administrator’s needs of the system, it did not include student perspectives and how the system facilitated student check-ins, which was crucial. To get a better perspective on this aspect, we visited one of the busier advising offices in person and observed while students checked in. From our perspective, there were two major issues:
Office administrators had a similar issue to advisors. When a student checked in, they had to refresh the page in order to see that student in their management page.
Administrators needed to see past appointments from the day for their own tracking purposes. Currently, the system only showed ongoing and upcoming appointments.
Prototype shown to office administrators as part of the first round of usability studies.
Prototype shown to office administrators as part of the second round of usability studies. This design incorporated feedback gathered from the first round, such as auto-updating of the information in the table, refinements to the sort options in the table, and symbols depicting the check-in status of students with appointments.
Prototype of one of the queue management pages shown to advisors during the first round of usability testing. This design shows a possible display for incoming students checking in.
Another prototype of one of the queue management pages shown to advisors during the first round of usability testing. This shows a possible display for students who have been claimed or removed by other advisors in the office.
Outcome
Upon full release of the kiosk application to all academic advising units at Indiana University, many of the feature requests resulting from the pilot group, usability tests, and observational studies had made their way into the application.
The system now offers advisors and administrators a way to manage their incoming appointments with real-time updates when students check-in or drop-in for unscheduled appointments. Administrators are able to immediately see new student check-ins, as well as view the appointment history of the day all through a single page.
The advising application is in use across many advising offices on all Indiana University campuses and feedback has been very positive. We continue to receive feedback for this system through the Office of Completion and Student Success (OCSS), as they communicate any new feature requests or issue reports directly to the team.
What’s next?
We are still generating many new feature ideas based on our research during the pilot phase, as well as feedback we have received from OCSS after the full launch. There are two main features we are expecting to incorporate in the near future:
Virtual appointment check-ins in the near future to better assist our student population during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Outlook integration to allow advisors to sync appointment data between their personal calendars and the kiosk system.
Based on feedback we were receiving about how advising office’s were currently handling virtual appointments through zoom, I began charting out how the workflow could be incorporated into the kiosk application.
Wireframing future ideas for a virtual kiosk check-in workflow. This would be a mobile friendly check-in process for students and advisors planning to have a meeting through a video call.