Overview
This project was created to improve the Utah Valley University IS&T website by redesigning it to be more attractive and user friendly. This was accomplished by modernizing and overhauling the IS&T website while still maintaining a consistent brand identity.
Users that use the IS&T website now will have a better experience and will be able to find the information they need faster, clearer and more updated.My role on this project was to be a team leader for some weeks and a contributor for the project. Me and my team worked together to make a final deliverable design product.
The Big Problem
Before this project, this website was very hard for users to get valuable information from. The images and degrees pages were full of non applicable images, the navigation was bad and some of the information was just outdated.
This redesign was intended to fix these issues so that students would have a better website to use in the future. Our teams redesign was also specifically focused around helping students looking at getting a minor find the information they are seeking.
Persona & User Research
Our group was tasked with redesigning specifically for students looking at getting a minor degree. When we did our user interviews we discovered that lots of students have taken extra classes and would like to see if they apply towards a minor degree. We also learned that these sort of students like to have up to date information that is easily accessible.
Mapping The Chaos
After doing our user research our team came up with a sitemap that would become the skeleton for our website. This framework helped us while we went through our next stages because we knew which content to include in the future.
Some of the changes we made to the IS&T website were to add a page about careers in this program. Prior to our redesign there was only one way to find this page and it was very buried in the website. We decided to make it more visible and accessible for users looking at careers in this program.
Wired Up
When we first entered the wireframes stage we created the basic outline. Although improvements were made later on, this served as a good base for what we would do in the future.
When we created the first draft of the wireframes each team member picked three screens to work on. After the first draft we each chose three of our other teammates wireframes and added on top of them. This helped make the wireframes more cohesive and made sure we didn’t make as many mistakes as we could have.
Mark 1 Prototype
The prototype looks pretty similar to the wireframes just with added images and colors.
We did add five new pages for each program because we thought this would make the navigation for the website much better. We also changed some formatting on the news page and the careers page to look nicer.
After making the surface comps we linked everything together and made everything clickable through prototyping.
User Testing
Following the creation of the prototype we tested some scenarios with 5 users. I tested 2 of these users and we found that our website was working pretty well.
While almost everything worked perfectly, we found that users needed a bit of time to understand how the website worked before navigating through everything. We decided that in the future it would be good to make the website a little less information dense all at once so that the navigation is easier. There is a lot of information so it can be really overwhelming for first time users.
Conclusion
Overall this project was a major success and we were able to discover lots of things that we didn’t know before. We accomplished our objective of making a new and improved version of the IS&T website with updated information and improved navigation.
By doing this project I was able to learn a lot more about working on a team together and doing user research more effectively so that our project turned out good. In the future I will value and use the skills I have learned by creating this design with my teammates.
Here is my prototype if you would like to take a look at it!