📍Context:

During Covid-19, when institutional learning was transitioning online, universities and faculties faced major difficulties in conducting virtual labs. With this pain point in mind, the Applications lab platform was developed to meet the needs of educational institutions by providing them with a cloud-based virtual computing lab.

However, due to a time crunch, the platform was quickly developed without adhering to IBM's Carbon design system.




🎯 Goal:

Redesign the platform to create a more usable, intuitive, and meaningful experience following the Carbon design standards.

⚙️ My process:

👥 Getting to know the users:

As a part of exploring the problem space, I started by understanding the goals and needs of three main user bases of the platform: students, teachers, and super admins.

• Students: Book or edit reservations to use virtual machines

• Teachers: Create, delete, edit, and manage virtual machines reservations

• Superadmin: Create, manage, edit, delete reservations, maintaining VMs, adding user groups, generating usage reports etc.

  
  

  
  
  

Evaluating the existing product’s UI

I started by doing a heuristic evaluation of the existing screens and performed the major tasks myself to list the UX issues. I played it back to the team for feedback on my findings and recommendations.

For the sake of the case study, I will be showing a few of the main screens with major design issues below:



1. Reservation Page

Goal: Instructor is able to make reservations for Virtual Machines to conduct remote lab or class

Concerns:

📍 missing headers, inconsistent date/time format, 
📍missing important user inputs in creating reservation modal
📍Inconsistent action items