KNET 3.0
KNET serves as a valuable information hub for HKS community members, but as Assistant Dean Davies expressed, it suffers from the classic problem of trying to be everything, to everyone. Operating as a dispersed intranet, content management and cross-department consistency have served as a challenge for KNET, and students have often criticized the platform for looking old, lacking relevant information, and performing poorly on mobile. However, there are a few design alterations that could make the performance and user experience of KNET much more enjoyable.
One of the initial challenges with KNET is the lack of personalization. There is no content customization based on who is visiting the site. Instead, the user is served ample amounts of irrelevant content that can feel overwhelming upon arrival. Given that KNET is a secured platform that requires Harvard credentials to access, it would be a drastic improvement if specific user content was delivered based on login ID, degree type, year, or administrative department affiliation. This has been implemented in student portals at other schools and makes user navigation far simpler. Going even further, allowing students to personalize their own KNET dashboards in a widget fashion would make the experience feel tailormade.
The second primary challenge for users is finding relevant information when it is needed. In today’s use case, KNET primarily serves as a landing page for linked information distributed via email. However this secondary communication stream may be less necessary if more robust search capabilities were implemented.
While search functionality exists on the site today, it is tucked away in the top corner of the home screen as a secondary thought for the user. Minimizing page content and increasing the prominence of the search box would direct users to this feature, helping to quickly point them toward relevant resources and reduce guesswork involved in finding them. This would also help alleviate mobile performance issues as multi-screen navigation and home page layout would be minimized, helping to ease cross-device transitions. Prioritizing search in the homepage layout would help decrease the user’s burden of navigating the complex information architecture and navigation menus on the site.
The antiquated software and high cost/time burden to updating KNET makes rapid iteration quite difficult, but now that it is time to redesign the system yet again we should do it right. Conducting a more extensive user design process and facilitating a number of student user interviews will help ensure user input is heavily captured into the site refresh. Moving to the cloud, minimizing page content and layout, and increasing the prominence of search will help make KNET 3.0 a flexible platform built for our community’s success.
