The Escoffier School
Triumph Higher Education is an educational technology organization that offers the only 100% online professional culinary diploma from an accredited institution in the United States, through the Escoffier School of Culinary Arts.
Role: Client Contact | User Interviews | Site Mapping | Survey Wireframes
Escoffier's existing student portal which we were tasked with re-designing. Includes the home page (left) and orientation (right).
The Original Challenge
Improve the digital experience for Escoffier’s full-time online students, many of whom are entering higher education for the first time. Describing the student e-Dashboard as “Frankenstein” and “user hostile”, a fresh perspective on course orientation and content strategy was needed.
Design improvements were to include:
Navigation
Folder extraction
Initial assignment submission
Use of third-party materials
Reshaping the Original Challenge
Were users hostile towards the online orientation process? Not exactly.
Student feedback was remarkably different from the problems initially identified:
The online program inherently catered to self-starters who would familiarize themselves with the technology until becoming comfortable with it
Students relied heavily on instructor support, even text messaging them directly
While workarounds required additional time, it didn’t negatively impact the educational experience
Insight: Students didn’t need a complete orientation re-design. They wanted and needed more relevant, community-driven content that would help advance their academic goals.
The goal was to provide a meaningful experience for its students — not just a transactional one. With agreement from our client, we shifted our focus to academic engagement for both introductory and active online students.
Passionate Cooks, Prospective Owners
Enrolling in Escoffier’s online program meant students were motivated to change or advance their careers while upholding family responsibilities and full-time jobs. Our users were:
Located in small to mid-sized towns, far from major schools and cities
Didn’t claim to be tech savvy but were regular users of mainstream internet sites
Discovered Escoffier’s program via social media or online search engines
Yearned to learn about the culinary industry, improve their existing skills, or start their own businesses.
Design Concepts
Design principles helped guide our process:
Empower All Students — with students coming from diverse backgrounds, our design should enhance their passion for culinary excellence and relieve any apprehensions by being approachable, understanding, and encouraging
Forward-Thinking — the design should accommodate individual working paces, anticipating the needs of those working ahead and those working to stay on track
Mise en Place — inspired by the French cooking term, we aim to guide the placement of information as well as the amount. Everything in its place, ready for when our students need it
Build Camaraderie — the design should help foster connections with the Escoffier community and provide ways to give and receive support so that online learning doesn’t feel like isolated learning
Then we ideated, created concept sketches, and tested these sketches with current Escoffier students. Finally, we converged selected ideas into a cohesive design and used a site map to organize and connect the information.
Desktop vs. Mobile
Between texting their instructors, checking Facebook groups, and taking photos of their cooking assignments, students used their mobile phones to do almost everything. However, we decided that the design solution was best suited for a desktop format as our user focus covered both introductory and active students. Introductory students were initially welcomed to the full-page web portal via Moodle, while active students engaged with coursework in the same way.
The desktop format also lent itself to a more meaningful time limit, which was essential for busy students.
Consider how the educational experience differs between online and in-person students. On a traditional college campus, there are two main areas: lecture halls, where classes are held; and community areas, where students gather to share knowledge and experiences. In order to bridge the gaps that exist for online Escoffier students,
How might we create a virtual campus that sustains students’ initial enthusiasm, encourages commitment, and supports remote, independent learning?
Design Outcomes
In usability testing, students found the initial prototype to be intuitive and exciting. Our client perceived the solution as a thorough, cohesive, and insightful design that would ideally be applied throughout online instruction. Considering the current learning management system (LMS) that the Escoffier online portal was initially built upon, our design provided a range of ideas that could be implemented both now and in the future.