Case Study: ACORN

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-centred approach to address these issues, through inclusive research, analysis, and iterative design 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.

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.

Our formative research helped equip us with an understanding of the context in which ACORN would be situated and a strong rationale justifying why it should exist, as well as an initial sense of how that success could be measured.

Motivated by that work, our design process leveraged existing research findings and continued to engage students and other stakeholders in practices that would afford the best possible outcomes from our work.

We followed an iterative process of structured empathy for our design work, typically beginning with an idea that was assessed for technical feasibility, then prototyped and tested with real people who might use it before committing any development resources in earnest (e.g. that a simple paper prototype, or a safe sandbox environment where people could roleplay an entire academic year with their own data). This experimental process allowed for refinement or radical refactoring when necessary and always helped guide us and validate our work.

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.

We began working on ACORN in earnest in 2013, 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, as well as staff across the university. These were some of the harshest learnings for the project team.

It was difficult, personally and as a project team to reckon with this. First, because we had let our users down when they relied on us most. Of course the root cause could be 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 begin to win back some of the trust we had earned (it took us several years – the usability score improvement I reference earlier is from after ACORN’s infrastructure was stabilized).