One of the main functions of the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) at UC San Diego is to administer campus living and classroom accommodations for students with temporary or permanent disabilities. At the time all parts of this process had to be done in person, including submitting medical documents and accommodation notices to various faculty members across campus. During my internship with UC San Diego's Administrative Technology Services I was tasked with designing a system for students to conduct this process online through their student accounts I worked with a team of front-end and back-end developers as well as OSD staff.
To understand the current how students received accommodations, our team met with OSD staff to learn about the process and discuss their interactions with students. Due to privacy issues surrounding student's medical history with OSD, we were initially unable to conduct research with students. Students were required to submit medical documents to OSD in person, wait for approval, and then distribute physical letters of accommodation to various faculty members.
OSD Staff wanted to create an online portal for students to manage the submission and receiving of accommodation related documents. In the long term, this portal would also be used for other services but the initial version was to focus on applying for and receiving accommodations.
Initial iterations focused on the accommodation process while providing a framework for features to be added to the system. Students submitted medical documents in person and were notified when they were approved for accommodations. Students could view but not accept accommodations until they signed a waiver. Approved accommodations were divided by class to allow students flexibility in deciding what they wanted. These were displayed in expandable cards due to the potentially large number of accommodations that could be approved per class.
I prepared questions and conducted 6 user interviews with UC San Diego undergraduates, 4 whom had not been to OSD and 2 who regularly had to visit the office. It was important to test on students with varying familiarity with OSD because any student on campus could potentially have to use the portal.
Because no new features would be added for a while after the initial release, I decided to keep the focus of the homepage on process of receiving and accepting accommodations. Notification of approved accommodations was moved to the home page which removed the need for a separate notification section. The signing of the waiver was moved before be able to view accommodations to avoid confusion.
This was my first project working with developers and it forced me to consider limitations from a developer aspect as well as what would be feasible to build in the given timeframe. Most information about the process of accepting accommodations came from our weekly meetings with OSD. However, I found that we kept running into problems throughout the project because we didn't have a firm grasp of how the office worked.
During development, I help with some styling on static HTMLs and with QA. I also helped test with students who used screen readers to ensure accessibility. The application is currently at use at UC San Diego.
