The Innovation Pipeline
Client: Babson College
Project Date: 2024

The Innovation Pipeline is Babson College’s process
for determining the usability and practicality of
academic technology tools. The Innovation Pipeline relies
on feedback from faculty members at Babson College,
and had experienced an underwhelming amount of engagement.

I led a research and design project to make a new site for
the Innovation Pipeline, focused on understanding user needs and a site redesign.

The Problem

Before beginning the project, the Innovation Pipeline was being hosted on a free Weebly site. While the page had a submissions section, there had been no submissions in 2023.

Screenshot of the old Innovation Site.

User Research

First, the process began with a current site evaluation. We evaluated the current site, looked for how users might find the site, and mapped out the sites current architecture. 


In order to understand why faculty members were not using the Innovation Pipeline, we sent out a faculty-wide survey to understand how faculty members find out about new academic technologies, with a 30% response rate for full-time faculty members. In addition, we ran two focus groups of 5-10 faculty members to gather qualitative research on the way faculty members find information. 



Not Many Faculty Members are Aware of the Innovation Pipeline 

Finding:  30% of faculty members contacted were aware of the Innovation Pipeline process, while 80% were aware of the Academic Toolbox/ Faculty Portal. 

Takeaway: Marketing, communications, email, and adding the Innovation Pipeline to the professor orientation process should increase the number of faculty members aware of the process.

Faculty Members have mixed modalities of how they ask technology questions with no clear best practice, and do not use the IPL site to submit ideas.

Finding: Faculty members who have technology questions use trial and error, ask colleagues, google, or call the help desk with technology related questions. In group interviews, faculty mentioned feeling comfortable emailing ATI Center staff with software and technology questions

Takeaway:  Remove the functionality to submit an idea on the IPL

More information about the IPL Process may result in faculty members being more engaged in the process

Finding: Faculty members were curious about how long phases of the IPL timeline take, how priority is allocated to certain projects

Takeaway: Adding more language to how the IPL process works on the website, mirror content on the faculty sites. Perhaps add a Frequently Asked Questions section. 

As a result of this process, we concluded that a redesign of the website, and a campuswide marketing plan would help to spread recognition of the Innovation Pipeline across campus.Use of softwares across faculty members according to survey

Redesign 

The redesign process began with a team led persona workshop to better understand user segments, ultimately landing on three unique personas based on technology engagement- “The Uninformed”, “Informed, but in need of Assistance”, and “The Proactive Professional”. 

Wireframes

After presenting the design research to Babson’s Instructional Design team and getting approval,we moved on to the visual design stage. Design began with pen and paper prototypes before moving onto wireframes. We planned to have an expertise and spotlight page, but left them to a future revision. 

Icon Design

From here, we worked on the visual design of the site- deciding to use four Babson brand colors and bespoke icons to capture the four stages of the Innovation Process. 

Site Design

Upon completing wireframes and a  Figma prototype, I personally designed and developed the site using Wordpress and Elementor. My team shared the new site design at Fall Into Learning, our annual academic technologies conference at Babson College. This Fall, we plan to further market and expand the site, which can be viewed at innovation.babson.edu.