UVU
College of Engineering
How might we design this website to recruit new students?
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This was a semester long project where I participated on a team of designers to propose a new look for the Utah Valley University College of Engineering website. My team's task was to conduct user research on how to better recruit new students through the site. With this research and our redesign we gave our final proposal at the end of the semester to the Dean of the College of Engineering. Many of the features we included in our redesign went on to be included in the next phase of the redesign process.
Problem
The current website is confusing and difficult to navigate. With many constraints and previous unsuccessful redesigns, the site needed to be updated. The Utah Valley University College of Engineering has a variety of information pertinent to students, prospective students, parents, and teachers. However all these users had a difficult time accessing that information. The site needed to redesigned so that using it would be a positive experience and that each party could achieve their goals.
Planning and Discovery
At the beginning of the project our team conducted a few activities. Activities included audience discovery interviews, surveys, and a stakeholder interview. All of this user research helped us to understand where the project was currently and where it needed to be improved before beginning to design. We wanted to know who was actually using the site and what they currently were experiencing. Check out the files to see more about what we discovered before our design process.
Survey Question Example
1. How many times have you visited the UVU CET website?
a. Many times
b. A few times
c. A couple times
d. Once
e. Never
Interview Question Examples
“So let’s say you’re interested in learning more about UVU College of Engineering, how
would you go about finding more information?”
“What is this? What is that for?”
“What do you think of that?”
“What do you expect that will do?”
How Might We Questions
HMW make the college stand out?
HMW clean up and reorganize the current site?
HMW achieve our client’s vision?
HMW persuade students to want to attend?
HMW make resources easily accessible?
HMW work within our constraints?
Research
In our user research stage we conducted a few studies to familiarize ourselves with the product and improvements that could be made. We conducted studies like a heuristic review of the site and a site content audit. The most exciting part of the research I did for this project was using eye tracking, we were able to see what caught our user's attention and how they moved through the website. All this research helped us to target pain points within our current product, develop solutions to problems our users were experiencing, and help us put a plan in place to put together our redesign.
Design
When it came to actually designing the new product, we had to remember our goal. Our team was able to split up responsibilities of who was in charge of which web pages. I took on pages like the student resources and corresponding pages. Below you can see the beginning wireframes for those pages. These wireframes were in some way a bit of a fail especially when it was time for team critique. A lot of the reason why the were a fail was I did not take into consideration my design constraints. The existing UVU website has a stylistic design already and my wireframes did abide by them as well as they could have. These kind of fail designs helped my team find different ways of displaying content in a new way. Some of the features I suggested in my wireframes we did end up implementing in our final design. Like you can see in the internship page, the almost file sorting system I created. One team member suggested we use the idea but instead we'd use a tabular system like in Google's Material Design, which you'll be able to see the iterated idea in our final design. Another idea I came up with in these wireframes was the choosing your major buttons in the headers of the internship and advising pages. This idea too was liked by my teammates and we iterated on the idea and it is present in our final design.
Testing and Validation
With our prototype finished, it was time to test out our new solutions. We chose to do a standard usability test on our exact target market, potential students! We wanted to see if we could attract new students to the site and, in the end, have them enroll in the college. Completing this project in 2020 and COVID restrictions proved to be pretty difficult by itself but luckily through the use of tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams we managed to work together well and also find study participants. I've included a file with our results from testing. Luckily my sister was a prospective culinary student at the time so conducting a usability test with her was exactly what we needed considering UVU CET has a culinary arts program that she didn't know about previously. We drafted a script from Jake Knapp's Sprint to use with our study participants. A lot of our new features were validated by our usability tests so we could validate our design's in our final proposal to our stakeholder.
Appropriate Scenarios
1. How many times have you visited the UVU CET website?
a. Many times
b. A few times
c. A couple times
d. Once
e. Never
Project Retrospective
I consider this one of my more successful projects. I feel like I gained an experience that in the real world that will be so valuable when it comes to future projects. My team worked together well despite all our circumstances. This project helped me to learn about why user research is so important and how it can be valuable even before you begin to redesign. This way my team and I conducted this project will affect the process of many of my projects in the future.