university students management
university students management
SOTS is an application used to manage students and all their matters that take place between students and the university. This desktop application has been used by WSB university employees for years, but as the number of students at the university increases and the application lacks internet communication, using it becomes very difficult. Thanks to the obtained subsidy, a decision was made to create software dedicated to WSB universities, operating as an intranet application and solving many problems of the previous system. The team delegated to this project consisted of approximately 50 people and included a Product Owner, Area Product Owners, Business Analysts, a UI/UX designer, and many backend and frontend developers. This group was divided into 4 teams, each with an APO, a business analyst and developers. The Ui/UX designer (me) has worked with all these teams.
The main problem of the old application was its slow operation, which was very noticeable with the constantly growing number of students. Therefore, the entire application architecture and sometimes also the logic had to be changed. The lack of communication with the Internet and the lack of any integration with external systems meant that employees had to perform some activities outside the application. Some works required the use of as many as four different applications to successfully complete a given process. Another major disadvantage was the lack of direct contact with students or lecturers. The need to implement an electronic document circulation module that was not present in the old application was also repeatedly pointed out.
The process of obtaining information from the business, about its requirements, needs, methods of working with specific activities, up to the functionality running in the browser, consisted of several, usually repeatable, steps:
As the only UI/UX designer working with 4 teams covering 8 thematic areas of the application, I had to be well organized. As more mockups were created, I started to design a library of components to maintain consistency between production teams and to deliver new solutions faster. Over time, a complete UI set was created, containing all the elements used in the application, such as: color palette, font variants, icons, buttons, form elements, tables, dialog windows, navigation etc. The document contained a set of rules, guidelines, styles, good practices and ready-made components showing how the user should interact with them. Based on it, developers created a component library (tailwind) in their own environment to maintain consistency and speed up work.
The project is still under development, but as we worked in the SCRUM methodology, a working product already exists in the test environment, and increases in new functionalities are visible practically every two weeks. The visual compatibility of the product with the UI set, in my opinion, leaves much to be desired, but the development of functionality and operating mechanics is really quite good. The speed of the entire application has also improved significantly, and the ability to access the program and perform necessary activities from anywhere (after logging in) is, according to employees, the greatest benefit.
