Re-designing the NTU EEE website with the usage of user experience design
General Assembly User Experience Design Immersive (UXDI) Project 2 Retrospective (a documentation of my learning process as a learning user experience designer)
Project Brief
This case-study project covers UX research, Information Architecture, designing of interface and interaction of prototype, Usability Testing.
Disclaimer: The brief for this project was created by the teaching assistants at General Assembly (GA), Singapore to imitate a real-life experience. The contents of this article is not affiliated with the company/organisation mentioned.
The students of UXDI were assigned to work in a group of 2 or 3 to redesign the Information Architecture (IA) and key pages layout/wireframes of a school website. Our design should meet the user goals represented by the given 3 personas, the goals of the school whose website we are redesigning and aligning to the school’s existing brand. An interactive prototype, which was one of the expected outcoms should include the key interactions/flows/pages for at least 1(one) of the persona’s tasks on the redesigned desktop website.

My partner Samuel and I were assigned to work on re-designing the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) website.
Something about NTU EEE that you might/might not know
The School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (NTU EEE) began as one of the three founding schools of Nanyang Technological University, then known as Nanyang Technological Institute.
Today, the School has become one of the world’s largest and top-ranked Engineering schools that nurtures competent engineers.

With a curriculum as dynamic as life itself, NTU EEE engineers a bright future by continuously evolving its course programmes to equip its students with the relevant knowledge, skills and insights to make a difference in the industry.
Our methodology
The main focus of this project was IA, and we broke down the project process into 3 using the following techniques. The techniques used in chapter 1 was the preparatory work we did to construct our IA before we validated them via the techniques in chapter 2 to finalize the IA. Chapter 3 was mainly prototyping out the re-designed website based on the final IA constructed and validating it with usability testing.

Chapter 1
To start with the project, Samuel and I started with navigating through the NTU EEE website and map out a content inventory site map of the current site. And we realised there were many webpages within the website that are either non-existent (maybe not accessible by public) or with repeated contents. That was when we started with our content audit to not include these meaningless webpages in our redesigned website.

The following are the drawn user flows of the 3 personas on how they would have to navigate through the website to fulfil their needs.



Heuristic Evaluation
As we did our content inventory, Samuel and I did a heuristic evaluation on the NTU EEE website based on the needs of the 3 given personas. This technique had helped us identify some of the pain points users will be facing when they are navigating through the website before we validate them with responses from the user interviews. Validation from user interview responses is needed because even though heuristic evaluation do have its advantages, it does not necessarily captures information from the users’ persective and is subjected to the evaluator’s bias.

In the initial stage of heuristic evaluation, Samuel and I planned to evaluate the NTU EEE website based on Jakob Nielson’s 10 heuristics only. However, as we were in the process of evaluating, we realised not all of the 10 heuristics are applicable for the evaluation of the website. We tried switching to the usage of IA heuristics only too, but the same problem arises again. Hence, the final decision was to evaluate the website using a combination of heuristics from both the Nielson’s 10 heuristics and the IA heuristics.
Competitive Analysis
Though NTU EEE is one of the best university offering Electrical and Electronic Engineering education programmes, but that does not imply that NTU EEE is not facing any competition. There are other universities in Singapore such as NUS and SUTD, who are offering similar engineering programmes to the same group of target audience too. Samuel and I thereby evaluate the 2 other universities mentioned using the same heuristics we evaluated for NTU EEE website. And the both of us agree that the NTU EEE website did not necessarily score better than the other two websites.
Business Analysis
And with our business analysis for NTU EEE, Samuel and I arrived at the conclusion that the target audience of our redeigned website would be prospective undergraduate students. This is because prospective undergraduate students are one of the most important stakeholders that uphold the NTU EEE’s brand and culture as well as affecting the school’s rating for success. Hence Mark, who is one of our given persona would be the one we will be focusing on when we were building our prototype.

With that conclusion, the demographics of participants for our user interview were students from Junior College (JC) since they will be attending undergraduate programmes in a few years time. From the user interviews, we were able to confirm some of the pain points we had identified during the heuristic evaluation as seen in the following.


In addition to that, we gained an additional insight whereby prospective undergraduate students look out specifically for the following 3 information when deciding on an undergraduate programme to apply for:
- Course modules information
- Course specialisation
- Research activities
However, though research activities could be found easily, unfortunately the JC students could not find any information regarding the course modules and specialisation information, This is because these information were not presented in webpages meant for prospective students but for the knowledge of current students.
Which is why though we had initially planned to only interview prospective undergraduate students, we went to interview some current students too. The purpose of interviewing these current students was to understand if they had any problems in finding and understanding the course modules and specialisation information that are presented to them. And the following was our insights.

And with the information gained with our preparation work, the challenge for project 2 was to redesign the NTU EEE website to be the best resource prospective undergraduate students can have to understand about the faculty and the programmes offering in order for the students to make the right choice in their undergraduate programmes application.
Chapter 2
Equipped with all the information we had prepared over the week, Samuel and I starts to draft out our IA for the NTU EEE website.


To validate our IA solution for the site, we conducted both card sorting exercise and tree jack exercise via Optimalworkshop. Optimalworkshop is an UX tool that offers a suite of tools to design researchers and information architects to improve the user experience of of their products.
The card sort excerise involves creating a set of cards that each represent a page on the website and asking participants to group the cards in a way that makes sense to them. Our card sort success benchmark rate was 70% since the default instructions for card sorting test given by Optimalworkshop are easily understood by users. Generally, the results were quite satisfactory except for a few tasks that were grouped differently from what we had expected. Those tasks whose success rate were under 70%, were the ones we focused on to improve our own site’s IA. The following were the insights we obtained from the card sort test and our solutions for them.



Tree jack testing exercise is a tool to find out if the labels and structure of information on the revised website, is easy to understand and find. Our success rate benchmark for the tree jack test was 50% and most tasks’ results came back to be satisfactory except for one.


With the results from our card sorting and tree jack testing, we managed to come up with our IA for the redesigned NTU EEE website.

Chapter 3
And all that was left was just the prototype which we managed to complete using Axure RP. The prototype was focusing on Mark’s needs though the needs of all 3 personas were taken into account during the process of prototyping. After the completion of the prototype draft, we conducted usability testing and the following were the key insights and feedback we received to improve on our prototype design.



Link to our completed prototype:
Reflections and Learnings
I had enjoyed collaborating with my project partner, Samuel and felt that I had learn quite a lot from him especially in terms of information presentation and improving on my designing skills. Some big learning from this project was how an information architecture can affect the user experience one had with a website. This project would definitely be a learning base for me to work on future IA projects.
Apart from what I had learnt from this project, the most surprising information I had learnt actually came from the user interviews. It was actually surprising to observe how users from different generation interacts with the same website.
For the students in Junior college who are born in the 2000s,
- They require more time to look for the required information and may not succeed in finding the required information.
- They expect to have more information in the menu so they can be directed to the correct webpage with lesser clicks.
For current students who are born in the 90s,
- They were able to look for the same required information with little difficulties.
- They knew instantly where to click in the menu to get the required information and do not mind going through different webpages before they got to the correct webpage with the required information.
As I was sharing my group’s findings with another team who was doing on the same NTU EEE website for the project, they too shared what they observed with users who are born in the 80s.
For users who are born in the 80s who are most likely people in John’s persona,
- Significant amount of time were needed though they were still able to find the information.
- However, many tabs of different NTU EEE webpages were opened for the comparison of information in the webpages before they could find their required information.
And from our sharing, both my friend and I were joking that universities should redesign their website and its IA every decade in order to suit the needs of different generations of students, thereby making sure that the user experience of their website would definitely be positive.
