Can I help you?

Suppose you are new to the Kennedy School, which is basically the case for half the student body every year. If you are in the MC-MPA program, you will only be here for one year and you want to take advantage of everything HKS has to offer. But one thing you will have to do before anything else is to incorporate almost a dozen new digital services into your life. Let’s stop at KNET, one of them.

Now suppose you have to choose five courses from a list of more than 300. I swear you will want to thoroughly examine all of them before making a decision. Then you want the course database in some kind of editable format (to filter, highlight, make notations). The good news is that you can download an excel file from KNET! This is KNET:

Your challenge is to find the excel file among all those links. And you will soon discover that KNET looks more like a newspaper than a service platform (who enters KNET to read news when the HKS Daily is in inbox every day?). But not to despair. If you feel lost among the incredible amount of information, there is a section on the homepage that leads you to the most popular sites:

Yes, the “popular sites” section is well below. You will find it after reading all the unpopular sections, scrolling down. To be honest, there’s is a simpler path to get there, through the main drop-down menu:

After searching among many other options about offices, departments, authorities and programs, you will enter courses. On the next page, you will see a list of courses, but not the downloadable file. However, if you read the instructions carefully, you will find a link for “sorting, filtering and exporting”. Yes!

Surprise! The link does not allow you to download anything, but instead directs you to … more instructions.

And you’ll find a list of 5 (+1) steps to download the database. If, after all, it doesn’t work, you can still get a 3 months old version!

In short, I think KNET should be revamped. It is far from being a user-centered service (non-human-centered design product?). It is organized from the logic of the service provider, which makes user’s experience very bad. The information and services it offers should be better prioritized, the amount of text reduced, graphic design improved to make navigation more agile and intuitive, and bureaucratic language translated into a simpler one.

If KNET were a person, I would be intrigued to know its bio. Navigating through its layers of information and services that seem to be patches over patches, I get the impression that there is a story to tell about it. It’s as if it had grown and accumulated content, but it learned little. As if it had lived a lot but has no experience. As if it had had an active social life but it was not able to improve from those interactions.

To revamp it, I would start by having a good diagnosis of what the users’ needs are, what their and what their priorities and obstacles. And that is something that cannot be known beforehand by the service provider, but it must be discovered together with the users. And only after that, prototype a new KNET, and then test it with the users, and then improve it and then test it and then improve it and so on (here some idea on how to do that).

Design thinking, they call it.

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