Proposta de redesign da interação e interface da funcionalidade de creditação de horas do SIGAA da UFC

Abstract

Starting from the need to computerize and integrate academic management procedures, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) developed SIGAA to address this need, and due to its efficiency, it gained notoriety and was quickly disseminated to other higher education institutions, including UFC. In 2022, aiming to integrate another academic management procedure, the functionality of accrediting complementary and extension activities was implemented in SIGAA with the intention of providing greater independence to students and streamlining the integration of workload. This study aims to understand the level of operational efficiency of this tool and also the satisfaction of students in using the functionality. For this purpose, the following objective was determined for this study: to evaluate the interaction between the user and the interface throughout the process of accrediting hours under usability criteria determined by the HCI field. This was executed through the Star Life Cycle methodology, which in the context analysis stage included conducting a contextual survey through a questionnaire aimed at students who use the tool and an interview in the format of contextual investigation. In the requirements specification part, a user journey was conducted to understand the student-SIGAA relationship and a priority matrix was created to prioritize and categorize elements of the interface. In the conceptual design and design specification stage, a content inventory was developed to have a holistic view of the screens, and a MESCRAI (Method for Evaluating the Suitability of Content and Organization in Interfaces) was applied to the inventory to reorganize the interface. In the prototyping stage, a wireframe was created to determine the new structure of the interface, and a high-fidelity prototype was developed to materialize the solution. Additionally, an evaluation was conducted for each deliverable in the form of a checklist, and a Cognitive Walkthrough evaluation was applied to identify navigation breakdowns, while the prototype underwent usability testing. As a result, students’ dissatisfaction with the tool was evident due to its low instructional level and the visual clutter of unnecessary information. As a positive aspect of the prototype, students pointed out that they liked the fact that it aimed to explain the interface items and did not contain unnecessary information.