AED Redesign
Working with another student to redesign the Aritechture and engineering website.
Team: Spencer Wright, Jeremiah Bradshaw
The Problem
In a meeting with the department stakeholders, we learned problems with the current site and the department’s vision for a new website. The current website didn’t tell the full story. It didn’t represent what they were all about, and the cool things going on in their department. They were also somewhat embarrassed to recommend people to their current site, as it didn’t have the “cool” factor.
Research
After getting a good baseline from our stakeholders, we did our own research to get more information. We conducted user interviews and sent out surveys to our target demographic. What we found is that people wanted to find program requirements, info on careers, and find an advisor. We also marked up the current site looking for usability errors to see what worked and didn’t work.
Research Takeaways
- Advising: We did user tests on the old website and found finding an advisor the most problematic. On the old site the advising tab would take you to the UVU page with all advisors. You would then have to scroll till you found the AED advisor. This is something we needed to address in our design.
- Requirements: Through our interviews/surveys we found what people wanted on a department page. They wanted to find program requirements, find their advisor, and find information on careers.
Design
After our research we got to deciding on the structure of the site.
Student projects and careers
One of the main gripes the department had with their current website is that it didn’t tell their story. We tried to address this on the landing page. We added a section that showcases the cool projects students have worked on, this section also shows awards won by students. Our idea with this section was to show the credibility and success of the department.
Advising
one of the other main uses of a department page is to setup a meeting /find your adivosr. On the current AED website clicking on advising in the navigation brings you to the general UVU advising page. This page has every UVU advisor, so it’s a pain to sift through and find yours. We simplified the process by having a dedicated page to advising. On this page we have a card with the advisor information and a button to setup an appointment.
Testing
We tested the site with 5 participants in our target demographic — college students, high school students, and parents. Most of our results were very positive. One problem we found was with the placement of a calendar. We originally put the calendar on the about page. But evryeone who we tested looked for it under the student resources. After testing we moved the calendar to student resources. And after that all participants were able to find things much more easily than on the current site. Also, Participants were able to understand the story and successes of the department and were able to make advising appointments with more ease than the current site.
Takeaways
Overall I really enjoyed working on this project. My team worked well together, and it was nice to have people to bounce ideas off of. This project showed me the importance of testing. Some of our assumptions proved to be a little off. And with the corrections we were able to make a much more usable site.
