Dive Brief:
- The University of Mississippi redesigned its student portal with accessibility for people with disabilities as a key concern, and mobile responsiveness a close second.
- Campus Technology reports developers of the new myOleMiss portal started thinking about content and then designed the app with the most limited devices in mind.
- From there, the team added features that work for smartphones, but only if they didn’t degrade the performance for other devices, creating a user-friendly environment for all stakeholders.
Dive Insight:
It is easy to run with new technology and shift to new platforms without starting from scratch. That can even be seen as a benefit of upgrades. But the Ole Miss team proves how powerful tools can be if they are redesigned from the ground up. Students who couldn’t ever use the portal on their own have the chance to do so now.
The process for designing a tool based on accessibility is similar to the process developers should use when going mobile in the first place. “Authentic” mobile approaches understand the platform as unique, recreating content and rethinking the user approach to end up with something new, rather than repeated.