OVERVIEW

University of Toronto Success Story

With over 17,000 graduate students across all campuses, the University of Toronto needed an updated graduate progress tracking solution that allowed students to submit requests online and faculty to monitor and track their students.

17k

users

4

month development build

2

weeks designing

With the wave of new graduates in the fall, we were engaged by the University of Toronto with an immediate three-month deadline to rebuild their graduate student management system. Due to this time constraint, the University of Toronto initially proposed to build additional features on an existing platform that exposed text fields with complicated JSON structures for users to interact with.

We knew this would continue to discourage student adoption despite the additional features. The previous system forced faculty and students to edit raw JSON in a text field.

We proposed an overhaul of their back-end and front-end applications, allowing faculties to confidently promote a new system and follow the university’s brand guidelines.

The existing graduate student management portal was built with legacy technologies and raw JSON input fields. Realizing the security risks, we rebuilt the system with Java, hardened the application with modern security standards, and optimized database requests to reduce calls and cache where possible.

User Experience & User Interface Design

Our creative team worked with staff and students to restructure the application based on user stories and actual use-cases. The application was reduced to a handful of pages, optimizing critical paths while keeping the focus on context.

API Development

Using Java Spring, we built a secure API with ORM support. We minimized slow external requests with server-side caching and integrated with their single sign-on system.

Mobile-first Web Application Development

With over 50% of traffic originating from mobile devices and the majority of the target audience being students, we knew that mobile support was a key component in pushing user-adoption. Each screen was designed to be mobile-first so every interaction to feel natural on a phone.

Within the initially proposed timelines, Quantum Mob rebuilt the platform from the ground-up and restructured the user flow into a smaller set of intuitive, user-friendly screens that gave control to students and allowed them to check up on the status of graduate progress applications.

Logins were tied into the University of Toronto’s central IT to allow students to use their existing logins with the system.

The ecstatic reception granted the Graduate Studies department an opportunity to demo the project across campus for every faculty. As it stands, the current demand for faculty adoption far exceeded all expectations.