Earlier this semester, I critiqued a Brown University student run website for a UI/UX class project. The website is called the Critical Review (https://secure.thecriticalreview.org/). The site takes class reviews made by students at the end of each semester and compiles them into more concise reviews, which are then posted online for members of the Brown community. The Critical Review is a site I use regularly. Before registering for classes, I always search for classes on the Critical Review to view their ratings and amount of work hours.
I originally critiqued the site in a post on Medium (https://medium.com/@juliakim_91752/the-critical-review-ebefaa26ca6e).
Overall, the site is very consistent in its visual design. The homepage (below) sets up how the rest of the site will look. The navigation bar is in the same position on every page of the site. In addition, all the same colors and fonts are used. However, searching for classes is a bit difficult to do. Most people search for classes by department. However, the departments are hard to search through because there are so many of them and they are located in such a small space to the left of the page.
In my redesign of the homepage, I tried to make it easier to search for classes by making the scroll box for departments larger. I also wrote out the full names of the departments rather than just using their abbreviations. In addition, I centered the search in the page in order to make that the main focus of the site.
I was always surprised by how difficult it was to sift through the information on each class (below). All the information is contained within large blocks of text, which is tedious to read through. In addition, the course and professor ratings are unclear. “Agree” and “disagree” aren’t clear ways to rate a class or a professor.
In my design of the course page, I separated information from each other by using headers. I also made the class ratings easier to understand by using stars to indicate ratings. The more stars the better. I also separated out important information students usually look for when viewing a course page — workload and prerequisites. I also put the search tool at the top of every page of the site. And I used a dropdown for the departments so as to better organize information and clean up the clutter on the site.
In addition to these changes, I also tried to make the other pages of the site more visually appealing by using a different font and making the site appear more modern. I kept to a simple design because the site is more about ease of use than aesthetic value. I also wanted it to be visually timeless so that the site does not need to be updated as often, especially since this is a student site that does not have the manpower available to consistently update the aesthetics of the site.
Here is a link to my interactive prototype of the Critical Review: https://ojdmqa.axshare.com