The document summarizes the development of a sustainable school information system called SustainIT. Personas and scenarios were created for key users. Feedback from a design session was both confirmatory of the need to allow user participation in development, and cautionary about challenges getting participation. Paper prototypes were developed and user tested, identifying critical and major usability problems. A hi-fidelity interactive prototype was then created based on the paper testing feedback.

1. SustainIT
Arman Arakelyan, Tea Dickman, Ülleli Lember

2. Idea and context
Idea: Redesign existing school information system
components into one sustainable and evolving system.
Discussion highlights:
- Minimal viable product
- Unobtrusive design
Context: Current Situation
& Similar Solutions

3. Personas and scenarios
Noora, assistant dean
Informed and concerted choices
Leena, teacher
Improved performance for teachers
Mari, student
Minimalistic design for students
Juha, developer
Informed development choices
Photos by Marc Schmier, @Doug88888, Karl Ericson, Suene Fernandes, Timothy
Krause.

4. Design session and concept map
Feedback on scenarios was
- Confirmatory
“The enthusiasm and numerous suggestions on improvement
made by the teacher illustrate the need to allow users to
participate in the development and improvement of
the features most used by them.”
- Cautionary
“The participant felt, that the students are more interested
in completing their studies and they therefore tolerate
less-than-ideal processes. The staff, on the other hand, are
busy with their work and would not find time to
participate, without reorganizing the whole work culture of
the university.”

5. Testing tasks and user stories
Task 1 – Providing improvement feedback on modules
Story #1: Sending improvement idea to developer
Story #2: Voting on comments
Task 2 – Analyzing user feedback
Story #6: System owner is viewing improvement feedback
Story #7: System owner decides on an improvement idea
Task 3 – Adding modules
Story #11: Adding a module
Story #12: Removing a module

6. Paper prototype & User testing
Prototype was developed based on user
stories. User testing identified 2 categories of
problems:
1. The critical problems were the
showstoppers
Example: “One user could not finish one task because he couldn’t figure out
“Module” selection and “Combination of the Modules” can be found there.”
2. The major problems were the issues
frequently mentioned by the testers.
Example: “ The analytics bars in the “Analytics” page were difficult to
understand, because it was not clear what they indicated or what the scale
was.”

7. Hi-Fi prototype user interface
Based on:
- paper prototype
- feedback from testing
We created:
- page layouts (Illustrator)
- semi-interactive prototype
(HTML/CSS/Javascript)