In 2017, I led a team to overhaul the Mount Holyoke College Menu which was, before we started, a tables based web interface tightly woven within .aspx. It closely resembled web applications from the late 1990's. My team produced a fully revised, user friendly digital experience that dramatically improved the selection of a students breakfast, lunch and dinner.
This page presents the arc of a development cycle that integrates user experience design, research and engineering at its core. I'll detail each phase of the cycle and share how we iterated and worked with stakeholders to gain approval. I'll also include specifics on how we used metrics, surveys, and moderated user testing to reach the final product.
Mount Holyoke Menu is built using a proprietary software application that controls food inventory, recipes, and the web presentation of meals for the day. Its importance lies in the fact that students reside on campus; therefore, depend upon this digital experience to make nutritious decisions. After doing an audit of the 133 digital products the college provides, I selected this as our first project.
Once we completed our heuristic analysis, we prepared a digital slideshow to document the project approach, scope of work and key issues to present. This helped to neatly pitch our project to stakeholders around campus. In this presentation we included:
I presented the proposal to key stakeholders from different campus divisions to pitch the benefit of the product upgrade. During the meeting, we received approval to move forward.