Improving user experience isn’t always about new screens or interfaces that make for a splashy presentation in a design portfolio. Sometimes it is about getting mundane business logic right, as in this example.
Beacon provides access to sensitive educational data, the confidentiality of which is protected by Federal and state laws as well as district and school policies. To ensure that data is safeguarded, there were strict security requirements in place, including mandatory logout of users after just a few minutes of inactivity. While this was a necessary security measure, it was also an annoyance. Thus, one change I championed was for the system to remember the full login state of a user who was logging back in after a brief time away—so that when you logged back in, it would be as if you had never logged out.
On the other hand, if you are logging into Beacon for the first time in a few days or longer, you probably do not want to return to the same data you had accessed during your last session. In particular, there is a very good chance that you are logging in precisely because new data has recently become available, and that that new data is what you most want to see. So for this purpose, I came up with business rules for the system to make reasonable guesses about what a user is most likely to want to see, and use those as the default values for the various parameter selection menus.
