User Experience and Design in a First Year Brightspace Course

Power of Persuasion is a first year seminar (FYSM) course in Rhetoric. Student resources are important in this course because FYSMs are meant to introduce new students to university and develop academic skills. In this FYSM, students practice their reading and analytical skills in the context of rhetorical concepts with current examples of persuasion and argument. Therefore, much of the course content is renewed annually to stay relevant with events and student interests. Subsequently, the Brightspace course site has become overwhelmed with course material, becoming cluttered and distracting. Our project worked to improve the user experience (UX) of the Brightspace page by updating the content and design. Addressing the content-related needs, we provided rhetorical analysis material by sourcing up-to-date opinion articles of relevance to students, and strategized how to guarantee the students would gain knowledge and give informed agreement to the Academic Integrity policies before beginning the course. Particularly, the student-partner was able to offer a valuable student and peer lens in searching for articles with a range of topics. For the design, we resolved to improve the UX for both the students and the instructor. To do so, we decluttered the interface so the students could find what they needed with more ease, and organized the platform and backend of the course site to create a simpler experience for the instructor. The student-partner’s role was to generate and test possible solutions to the design problems, and to implement the ones that best suit our goal to improve UX.