Tara N. Bazler

Student Billing

The Student Billing service is for students and authorized payees to view statements, track charges and credits to their account, and access the vendor to make payments. The current system was designed to be a small content area within a financial page of a student portal. Branding and user identification information was to be handled at the portal level. Given the small area it would occupy within the portal, it was designed in a narrow area, never expanding to take up a full window on a larger screen. The navigation controls were originally designed as a hierarchy; however, when released, any visual indication of that hierarchy had been removed leading to difficulty for the users. The screenshots below of two pages within the system (Current Status/Summary and History/Date) show many of the curent design issues.

The project's redesign goals include:

• Update navigation
• Include university branding
• Update overall styles to follow the direction of the style guide being developing in parallel to this project.
• Restructure the layout as a stand-alone application
• Remove outdated requirements from the interface
• Provide layout specifications for users on mobile devices

For the Account Summary screen, the design changes include:

• A header bar and the IU block tab to brand the application.
• The title of the service, 'Student Billing', is shown in the header.
• The logged on user is identified and their userID is shown right-aligned in the header bar.
• The navigation has been simplified to four links which are displayed across the top of the application.
• The notice that a payment is past due has been pulled out from the main content and is displayed just below the navigation bar as a user alert.
• Colors and styling are updated to follow the emerging style guide for Enterprise Student Services.
  

In the new design, activity since last statement is shown at the top of the statements screen. This allows the user to view new charges and payments along with the current statement. Older statements are available below the most recent statement, with each statement defaulting to closed, so the user can scroll through and pick out the date of interest more easily.

On the 'Activity by Date' screen, the user can search for any date range of interest to view activity that occurred at that time. The user can enter dates free form or use the calendar widgets to specify. Activity is displayed in chronological order with oldest at the top of the list. The overall look and feel was updated and the order of data columns in the results was reorders to display the numerical amounts right-aligned on the right edge of the screen.

The screenshots of the new design above were taken from the prototypes created using Axure.

520 N. Cabot Ct. Bloomington, IN 47408   •   Phone: 812.361.1810   •   Email: tnbazler@mac.com