48 hours
Students and Professors at Sheridan College
Adobe XD
UX/UI Designer, Visual Designer
Yasmine Abdelrahman, Natalie Tan,
Julia Correia
Initial Challenge
This project was completed as our entry for Hackville 2021, a MLH recognized Hackathon, hosted and organized by Sheridan College students. This year the theme was accessibility .
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While Sheridan does offer accommodations for students who need them, the process of applying for, requesting, and actually getting them as it stands currently, involves a lot of back and forth, tedious paperwork, and during normal
times, walking across campus up and down several floors. This makes it unnecessarily difficult for students who need them, to access accessible learning services.
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Timeframe
Target Audience
Tools used
Role
Team
Research
In order to come up with a solution to this problem, we needed to understand each step of the process.
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As the process currently stands at Sheridan College, a student must go through the following steps to apply for accessible learning:
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-Deliver all supporting documentation at the corresponding offices on-campus.
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-Download, print, sign, and deliver a confidentiality intake form.
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-Book and attend a transition session.
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-Book and attend an intake appointment.
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This process involves a lot of walking around and can sometimes be slowed down by processing times.
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To actually get accommodations for specific, classes/exams/assignments, students need to email their accessible learning advisor and their professors back and forth.
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Design Requirements
-The portal needed to streamline the whole process, from applying when first admitted to Sheridan, to requesting accommodations for specific instances.
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-It needed to be accessible.
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-It needed to create three way channel for students, accessible learning advisors, and professors to communicate more effectively.
-It needed to guide students throughout the process and clearly indicate to them what their next steps are.
-It needed to simplify the document delivery process, and completely eliminate the need to walk across campus several times.
Features
Streamlined process
When students log into the portal, after completing their profile, they will be shown a visual representation of the application process in the form of a timeline.
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They will be shown what their next steps are and prompted to complete them.​
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When they complete a step the timeline changes colour to indicate their progress.
Whenever the process requires them to book an appointment, they will also be able to do that directly here.
Digital Document Submission
Allowing students to submit all the documents
they need through the portal will completely
eliminate the need to run around campus printing and delivering documents.
Some documents and forms will only be unlocked once others have been submitted.
Accesibility
The portal will be include an accessible button that allows users to toggle several accessibility
features, like inverted colours, bigger text, and
screen reader.
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Simplified communication
The "request" tab will be like a three-way
communication channel where the student, their
accessibility advisor, and their professors will be able to communicate, request, and approve
accommodations for specific situations.
Visual Design
Because we were designing this as it were a Sheridan College portal, we followed Sheridan's style-guide and branding .
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We used the existing Sheridan website as reference and used the same colour palettes,
typography and similar textures.
