eCampus Ontario
Collaborating with Purpose: A New UX Framework for Learning
Client
eCampus Ontario
Year
2017
Expertise
- Accessibility
- Agile Methodology
- UI Design
- UX Design
In the pursuit of accessible resources for higher education, we joined forces with a number of partners to develop a prototype for publishing digital textbooks. Together, we’re lightening the load on backpacks and wallets for students everywhere.
Why this project was a success
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1
Clean and customizable design for use by a wide variety of networks & communities.
-
2
Prioritized mobile-first & responsive design to ensure accessible reading experiences.
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3
Developed user personas & journeys to properly reach, engage & grow their audience.
Collaborating for open education
eCampusOntario and Ryerson University spearheaded a project to develop an Open Publishing Infrastructure to serve students and educators across Ontario and beyond.
Plank was selected as the lead UX designer and worked in partnership with Pressbooks and Agile Humanities to create a fresh design framework for both network catalogues and webbook content.
Creation, consumption, customization
The Pressbooks publishing platform is designed to serve two main user groups; authors and readers. The network landing page is designed with a clear call to each group to begin their journeys to create or find content.
The prototype is intended for use by a wide variety of networks and communities, so the design is clean and easy to customize by adding logos, custom colours and content.
Smooth searching
Facing an ever-expanding library of ebooks to contend with, we needed to create a clear layout for robust search, filter, and sort functions – without losing any information on mobile screens.
Judging a book by its cover
The book homepage contains a lot of information. Our design challenge was to present the many features – cover image, table of contents, book description, authors, updates, and metadata – in a format that encourages the user to download and read the book.
An enjoyable, accessible reading experience
The central design challenge of this open textbook platform is, of course, the actual reading experience. We created a sharp, clean, distraction-free design. The “learning lens” tab allows the user to adjust elements of the interface such as text size and line spacing, while the menu includes bookmarking and note-taking functions.
The framework is designed to be responsive and optimized across all screen sizes, from smartphone to desktop.
About the client
eCampusOntario is a provincially-funded non-profit organization that leads a consortium of the province’s publicly-funded colleges, universities and indigenous institutes to develop and test online learning tools to advance the use of education technology and digital learning environments. eCampus is their Open Library Publishing Platform - Pressbooks for Ontario's Postsecondary Educators.
