Reimagining the SCU Bulletin

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Check out the bulletin. 2019-2020 SCU Undergraduate Bulletin.

Improving a painful process

If you are a college student, how do you know what your core requirements are? What classes do you need to take if you are a Communication major, and how many units do you need to graduate?

Students received a novel-sized publication every year that helped them understand their academic journey—the Undergraduate Bulletin—to serve as the source of truth for academic programs, university centers, and policies. It helped students, faculty, and staff answer questions, resolve disputes, and help guide decisions that could shape a student’s career. However, the existing bulletin system faced several critical challenges:

  1. Resource Intensity: At nearly 700 pages in print, the bulletin’s production was extremely resource-intensive.
  2. Complex Collaboration: The project required extensive collaboration across the entire university, involving multiple departments and stakeholders.
  3. Time-Consuming Process: The art, content creation, and production processes were long and arduous.
  4. High Costs: Print costs averaged over $60K per year.
  5. Outdated Information: Due to its static nature, the printed bulletin became outdated as soon as it was published, limiting its usefulness throughout the academic year.

Ultimately, we needed to transform the bulletin process and product into a digital solution.

The Bulletin as a product

The goal was to provide a functional and aesthetic experience that helped users find what they needed quickly and easily.

  1. Completely Online: Transition the entire production process from print to digital, eliminating the need for physical copies.
  2. Online Collaboration: Facilitate seamless collaboration among university departments and stakeholders through online platforms.
  3. Cost and Time Efficiency: Significantly reduce the time and financial resources required for bulletin production.
  4. Enhanced Accessibility: Create a mobile-friendly, easily searchable document that would be more user-friendly than its print counterpart.
  5. Real-time Updates: Enable the ability to update information in real-time, ensuring the bulletin always contains the most current information.

The primary objectives of this initiative were to:

From vision to strategy

The implementation of the digital transformation for the undergraduate bulletin followed a strategic, user-centered approach:

User Research and Process Analysis

Technology Selection and Integration

Iterative Development and Testing

Workflow Optimization

Accessibility and Performance Focus

Results and Impact

The digital transformation of the Santa Clara University undergraduate bulletin yielded significant positive outcomes across multiple areas:

Improved User Experience

Efficiency Gains

Cost Savings

Environmental Impact

Real-time Updates

Collaborative Workflow

Accessibility

The transformation addressed the initial challenges and brought about additional benefits, positioning the undergraduate bulletin as a more effective, user-friendly, and sustainable resource for the entire university community.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

While the digital transformation of the undergraduate bulletin was largely successful, there were some challenges and important lessons learned:

Challenges:

  1. Technical Integration: The transition from Google Docs to GitBook required some manual intervention; building the product took some knowledge of the different systems and products, and the automations needed to be kicked off manually.
  2. Long-term Sustainability: While the solution was creative and practical, the open source product at the core of the documentation went closed-source, necessitating a new technical solution.

Lessons Learned:

  1. Plan for Scalability: When implementing custom solutions, planning for scalability from the outset is crucial. This includes considering how the process can be managed and executed by team members with varying levels of technical expertise.
  2. Admin Interface: Building an admin-facing interface for managing the transition between platforms could have improved the process’s longevity and accessibility.
  3. Documentation is Key: Thorough documentation of complex processes is crucial, but it’s equally important to design intuitive systems to reduce reliance on extensive documentation.
  4. Consider Future Handoffs: When designing processes, consider how they might be handed off to other team members or departments.

These lessons highlight the importance of balancing innovation with practicality and long-term sustainability in leadership. They have informed subsequent design initiatives by emphasizing the need for scalable, user-friendly solutions that can be easily maintained and transferred within an organization.