Putting students first, by design.

The Student Centered Design Lab provides design, research, and strategy services to improve student access and success within higher education. 

It’s great you’re looking at student input. At the end of the day, it’s the student that’ll be using and benefiting from it!

 

– American River College student

Building a better student experience

Over 2.1 million students attend the nation’s largest and most diverse higher education system. They face unintended barriers into and through community college.

The Lab helps its partners identify, understand, and remove these barriers, ensuring students remain the focus of human-centered design processes. That way, students can concentrate on reaching their goals.

With the Chancellor’s Office and systemwide partners, the Lab is co-creating a more accessible, seamless, and equitable educational experience for everyone – starting with the Student Journey to Success Project. 

 

 

Applying equitable design principles to the
student experience

  • Empathize

  • Define

  • Ideate

  • Prototype

  • Test

  • Implement

Creating usable designs
through collaboration

Interested in participating in the design process, or gathering student input?

– Eloy Ortiz Oakley Chancellor,
CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGES

Our vision for change puts a sharp focus on students’ goals and needs, designing and making decisions that put students first, having high expectations and high levels of support for all.

– Eloy Ortiz Oakley Chancellor,
CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGES

Lab services

Advancing products, policies, processes, communication campaigns, and more to be equity-centric and outcome-focused.

The Lab offers:

Design

  • Services

    • Ideation workshops and design sprints
    • Persona development
    • Student journey mapping
    • Wireframing and prototyping
    • Competitive audits

  • Expert review

    • Design quality evaluation
    • Heuristic evaluation
    • Technical evaluation
    • Accessibility evaluation
    • Taxonomy evaluation

Research

  • Quantitative

    • Usability testing (to evaluate, track, and compare usability)
    • Analytics analyses
    • Search log analyses
    • User surveys
    • A/B testing

  • Qualitative

    • Usability testing (to inform design and identify usability issues)
    • User interviews
    • Diary studies
    • Card sorting
    • Tree tests