What we do
The User Experience Research & Design (UXRD) team partners with CU Boulder units to improve the technology experiences of our students, faculty and staff. We’re a team of researchers, designers and content strategists who work closely with students and others at the university to identify and design improvements to CU’s tools and services. The UXRD team continues to support the efforts of the Unified Student Experience project to simplify and streamline the landscape of campus technologies for CU Boulder students. We believe the entire student experience is interconnected, so we seek to understand the complexity of this experience to create holistic, student-approved solutions with positive impact.
We primarily support the continued development of Buff Portal, CU Boulder’s student portal. Occasionally, we partner with other university groups to improve strategic and impactful user experiences.
How we do it
Conducting user research synchronously, asynchronously
- Ethnographic interviews, focus groups and surveys
- Field, diary and destination studies
- Expert reviews and usability tests
- Analytics and optimization experiments
- Benchmarking and competitive analyses
- Our team has success meeting both in-person and via Zoom
Designing the user experience
- Facilitate design workshops and reviews
- Create low and high fidelity prototypes, wireframes and interactive mockups
- Content strategy support based on user feedback
- Create style guides and iterate on best practices
- Collaborate with CU’s Digital Accessibility Office to ensure accessibility of designs
- Align work with campus brand and identity
Communicating user research and design
- Advocate for user needs, including the needs of underrepresented voices from the CU Boulder community
- Share learnings of user-centered design sessions to create personas, user journeys and storyboards
- Conduct task analyses and prioritization to determine user requirements and “jobs to be done”
- Provide user-centered content and experience maps
- Share impact data visualizations and dashboards
Who we are
Student Employees
- Emrys Baldonado - Graduate UX Researcher
- Shilpa Mehta - Graduate UX Researcher
Staff
- Chelsy Albertson - UX Content Designer & Researcher
- Courtney Fell - Program Manager UX Research & Design
- Kyra Moran - Temp. Content & UX Designer
- Nathan Raczynski - Temp. UX/UI Designer
- Shane Schwikert - Senior UX Researcher
- Dhaivat Shah - UX/UI Designer
- Paola Solorzano Bravo - UX Writer & Researcher
- Dawood Suleman - Senior UX/UI Designer
Contact us
- Interested in participating in user research and design activities? Email user-experience-oit@colorado.edu to be added to our activity outreach list.
- Want to tell us about your current experience with Buff Portal? Send us feedback through the portal.
- At this time, the UXRD team's capacity is limited, as is our ability to accept work requests from other campus groups. Nevertheless, if you're interested in our service, we'd love to hear from you! Reach out to user-experience-oit@colorado.edu.
