Project Overview
The UVU School of Education advising team was looking for a facelift to their advising pages and to improve user experience. Conducting surveys, user research, and applying modern design heuristics, we created a design that delivers just this.
In the fall semester of 2024 at UVU, a team and I from an interaction design class took on the task of redesigning the advising page for the UVU School of Education website. Naturally, the first place we headed was in the direction of the actual users. After performing surveys of students in and outside of the UVU School of Education, we had developed a good idea of what was missing, what could be added, and what should change.
After a sufficient amount of data was collected, we decided it was time to test our assumptions with the actual users. This primarily consisted of meeting with users and conducting eye-tracking tests on campus. These tests were conducted with people who have not had any interactions with the School of Education or its website in order to prevent bias in the results that we would likely see with someone who has previously interacted with the website. This led to creating user personas that would later be used to demo the project in our final presentation.
Not only did these eye-tracking tests help us confirm our assumptions, but they also led us to later propose a larger project scope. What we found was that no only were users having trouble navigating the advising page for the School of Education, but they found that the School of Education’s website as a whole was difficult to navigate.
Now that we had what data we needed, we went to sketches and wireframes for the whole website, no longer focusing on just the advising page. Our team liked the direction of the design that the UVU homepage was using and decided that this would be a safe design to base our redesign on, since it represented the University as a whole. Working hard to maintain consistency, simplicity, and modernity from the main UVU website, we stuck to the brand guides and marketing materials we were able to source. Spreading out the page designs among our team members, I took charge of the UVU School of Education homepage redesign to set the tone. Drawing inspiration from UVU’s home page helped significantly and led to many of the design choices we made as a team.
After completing our redesign, we presented it to the advising team of the UVU School of Education and prepared it for hand-off for another team the following semester(s). Wanting to showcase not only our design skills, but also our skills as operators, we opted for pitch-deck style presentation that was short, snappy, and to the point. As the lead designer of this slide deck presentation, I took inspiration from Guy Kawasaki and Get Backed by Evan Baehr and Evan Loomis, inspiration I then took to my own startup pitch to venture capitalists only a few days later. Coming in at only 12 slides, each slide was created with a specific purpose in mind and did not detract from our project proposal or project plan. In the early stages of our project we made the mistake of overcomplicating things and wanted to stand out as a team that didn’t do that during our final presentation.
“I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” - Blaise Pascal*
Our team was also surprised to learn that we were the only ones to maintain the school’s brand identity in our presentation of the redesign. We went into our presentation strong and confident in our redesign.
Though our team was confident in the outcome of the project overall, it was not free of difficulty. In the early stages of the project, the scope was not made clear, leading to confusion in what our roles and responsibilities were. It’s also possible that our team did not do a great job of defining team roles and expectations, since some team members struggled with their designs more than others, leading to some misaligned designed choices. Ultimately these complications were mostly sorted out and we produced the results we were aiming for.