Michael Clark

Case Study: ACORN

ACORN (the Accessible Campus Online Resource Network): Intro

I led the UX practices to create ACORN, the personalized hub of student tools and information at the University of Toronto (U of T) to manage course and program enrolment, student finances, as well as everyday life.

The ACORN dashboard showing an overview of a student’s activities for the day, as well as current academic and financial statuses with prompts to take next steps.
Before: Course enrolment in ROSI-SWS, limited to alphanumeric code entry on a per-course basis
After: Course enrolment session tabs, enrolled and waitlisted courses, and natural language search in ACORN
Before: Waitlist management in ROSI-SWS, limited to management on a per-activity basis with no guidance
After: A waitlist management modal with helpful tips for modifying selections in ACORN

The university should be more responsive to students’ needs… They should listen more to students.

—1st year Faculty of Arts & Science student

The problem: 100,000+ students were increasingly fed up with U of T’s services and legacy systems. These were difficult to discover, disjointed, inaccessible, unintelligible, outmoded and seemingly punitive at times (e.g. an online tool displaying only a confusing error code after an unsuccessful time-sensitive course enrolment attempt, with no guidance on how to correct the issue).

Issues like these caused undo student stress, contributed to failed task attempts, increased support tickets, redundant processes, as well as resulted in under-utilized services. It was time for a new generation of student services to be imagined and produced.

My User Experience & Process Design team, where I was initially the Senior UX Designer and later the Manager, employed a human-centric approach to address these issues. Through inclusive research and design in an agile scrum workflow we consolidated and simplified important processes, while providing students with timely, personalized, and helpful information to empower them to take informed actions.

Outcomes: Course enrolment times were halved with reduced stress about the process, engagement in student services increased, system usability scores increased (from ~37 to ~82 out of 100 vs. ACORN’s predecessor), and students finally had a mobile-friendly and accessible (WCAG 2.1 AA) online platform to engage with services.

From a recorded mobile usability testing session
A paper prototype of an Android tablet to assess readability and usability
A high-fidelity mock-up of ACORN’s Courses screen for the upcoming term
A snapshot of a whiteboard after an extensive sketching session. I had been thinking about where and how to maximize awareness of the new ‘enrolment cart’ feature.

ACORN: Early Stages

Collaboration and co-creation were essential to making ACORN, even before its formal inception.

Even before its formal inception, ACORN was a collectively-driven initiative. Student voices joined staff to raise up issues negatively impacting their experiences at U of T, which prompted the university to conduct a series of focus groups on issues facing student services at U of T. Those findings were the impetus for creating the Next Generation Student Information Services Program that I joined, with ACORN being our most ambitious initiative.

My team conducted further research to develop our baseline understanding of students’ current experiences, map the ecosystem of services at play, then learn about crucial (and complicated, and sometimes confusing!) business processes that needed to be addressed.

We did so by engaging students and staff to co-create ACORN with us via structures such as the NGSIS Student Advisory Team, which we created to ensure representation by students from across all of U of T, as well as advisory and working groups with staff experts.

Takeaways from focus group held with students on a potential overhaul of ACORN’s predecessor
Results from an early student card sort exercise that helped determine ACORN’s content structure
Posters that were distributed to promote joining our Student Advisory Team ahead of ACORN’s launch
Takeaways from a staff discussion on pain points in the online delivery of services and current student experiences
Google Analytics data showing device resolutions accessing ACORN
ACORN’s bounce rate dropped by 82% compared to its predecessor. More students accessed the system
successfully and found the information they needed.
A lot of our work took place in spreadsheets. This one captured the anticipated value of potential ACORN features across different academic divisions.
Some of the personas we used during ACORN’s initial design efforts, e.g. Jennifer the Ambitious who was a straight-A student in high school but struggled when she transitioned to university
Jennifer’s user journey map, illustrating her first-year struggles and subsequent recovery with the help of supportive services and her good choices about her future
Members of ACORN’s UX, Development, and Communications teams out on the street to talk with students directly about their experiences.
Yours truly hosting a poll at a campus festival on potential ACORN feature enhancements – this largely served as a prompt to spark conversations with students about their experiences and solicit their input.

Envisioning ACORN: A holistic perspective

ACORN’s purpose as the central hub connecting students with services from across the university, as well as being a service delivery mechanism itself meant I needed to understand and design at that system scale.

One challenging aspect of ACORN was grappling with complexity. Our objectives demanded careful and extensive mapping of interconnected systems, front- and back-stage actions, business processes, as well as the logic governing various transactional controls and calculations – to say nothing of various underlying new and legacy infrastructure that would enable and constrain different aspects of ACORN’s potential capabilities.

Tools like canvases, journey and process maps, and other user and technical diagrams were essential to facilitate collective understanding and problem-solving of how services may currently operate, as well as how improvements could be realized in the future. Participatory activities and workshops leveraged these tools along with other practices (e.g. ideation methods) to reach and inform breakthroughs.

The early stages of mapping front- and back-stage aspects of the the university’s convocation service. This composite snapshot includes print-outs of existing service screens and preliminary mock-ups, outstanding questions to investigate, as well as references to technical Jira tickets that would require analysis. Also featuring stray graffiti from a visiting colleague.
A business process map as my team worked through how students, Accessibility Services, ACORN, CIS, faculty, and Test & Exam Services would all collectively provide the service of accessible exams for students.
A user story map for the initial and subsequent releases of a new GPA calculator product, initially only public but then eventually also integrated with an identified and authenticated student’s information.
An opportunity canvas. I would often use canvases of different sorts ahead of working sessions with PMs and other functional leads (e.g. each fills it out individually and then compares notes collectively) to clarify our assumptions going into a major phase of work and also to identify and begin to address problems (from conceptual to functional).
Along with all manner of low and medium fidelity sketches and wireframes, I led the creation of a Figma-based design system for the appearance, functionality, and content of our new products and services. This living resource helped speed up and clarify the workflows of designers, developers, QA testers, and communications staff.

ACORN is intuitive, it’s in a comfortable format compared to other products around today, and it simplifies students’ lives so that they don’t miss steps. Missing steps at U of T or any institution can be very harmful to your academic progress. Our goal is for students to be engaged with the University experience,
not engaged in figuring out the administration.

—Lucy Fromowitz
Assistant Vice-President, Student Life

ACORN’s story is one of patience and persistence to deliver improvements to tools and the delivery of services. This was accomplished via continual improvement that eventually transformed the experiences of everyone who used the system.

I began working on ACORN in earnest in 2013 as part of a dual-track agile team (supporting Dev in sprints as that team delivered early functionality, while UX concurrently worked through discovery sprints), and the system went live in 2015. However, several early peak load days were marred by infrastructure crashes, something we had to transparently acknowledge and communicate about with students and staff across the university. These were some of the harshest learnings for the project team.

It was difficult to reckon with this because we had let our users down when they relied on us most. The root cause of the downtime was of course identified, but a catastrophic failure is still just that – and not what you want as a student on a stressful enrolment day when spaces in classes are limited. It stung to read outraged comments about the work we had done and to know how hard it would be to earn back some of the trust we had (it took us several years).

150 comments gathered at a student fair, clustered into 16 initial categories for analysis
ACORN’s initial launch and several peak load days were marred by infrastructure crashes, something we had to transparently acknowledge and communicate about with students, as well as staff across the university. These were some of the harshest learnings for the project team.
We were glad to learn about how our new timetable features were being put to good use
The 3 design tenets I held to during ACORN’s creation were that it was to be timely, personalized, and helpful, so this response from a student was great to read

In my first year, I had to enter all of my course information manually through ROSI – a time-consuming and confusing process. With ACORN I can easily find my courses, pre-select them and on registration day I simply press the enrol button and I’m good to go!

– Ibraheem Aziz
Third-year Rotman Commerce Student

I’m most proud that with this project, we grew as an interdisciplinary team, exceeded expectations, delivered on our commitment to transform how services were delivered across the institution, and implemented a vastly more user-friendly platform as the new central online hub for U of T students. We improved experiences and built the platform that will be extended going forward into the future.