This redesign of Ryerson’s Administrative Management Self Service (RAMSS) website was done by myself and a group of peers as part of a design thinking exercise undertaken for an Intro to Design Thinking course.
Our class was tasked with addressing the issue of student wellbeing however we saw fit. To develop our solution, my group and I discussed at length what wellbeing means to us and what contributes to or detracts from it - school, work, finances, nutrition, sleep, etc. - because being students ourselves, we were a part of our target audience. We found that many of these aspects were intertwined, which in some ways made it more difficult to address the problem. However, we also found that because these aspects were so intertwined, by tackling one specific aspect we would also simultaneously alleviate the negative impacts of the others.
One activity we had done earlier in the semester involved drawing what an inclusive classroom looked like to us. Many of us included accommodating different styles of learning (e.g. visual, auditory, kinesthetic) in our drawings. This activity came up in our discussion of wellbeing, as we felt school, particularly the stress of being in classes with evaluation methods that do not suit your academic strengths/preferences, was a significant detriment to our collective student wellbeing. As such, we decided that by redesigning RAMSS in a way that allowed students to easily understand their academic options and select courses that meet their learning needs - which we felt both the outdated and updated versions of the website (see left) did not - we could improve the academic wellbeing of students. Doing so, we believed would help students better enjoy and succeed in their classes and potentially result in less time wasted struggling with course content, which would give students more time to work and earn money, sleep, and cook nutritious meals for themselves.
Our original digital prototype of the RAMSS redesign, which I later updated (see above) to incorporate feedback provided by our peers and professor during our prototype presentation, as well as the current and prior official versions of RAMSS, can be found below.
ABOVE: My group's initial redesign of RAMSS.
ABOVE: The previous (top) and current (bottom) official versions of RAMSS.