UGA College of Engineering Homepage Redesign
Reimagining the college’s homepage to better connect with our audience.
Summer 2023
Project Overview:
Established July 1, 2012, the University of Georgia College of Engineering has grown from approximately 400 students to more than 2,600, with more than 140 faculty and staff. Currently the third largest college at UGA, the demand to study engineering is higher than ever, and the college needs a website that can keep up. This redesigned website homepage includes a cleaned-up navigation, updated look, and accessible design.
The Challenge:
While the current college homepage is effective, it falls short of its full potential. The three primary challenges of the page include:
- The navigation needs to be streamlined.
- The look needs to be modernized.
- The design needs to be accessible.
In order to understand how to accomplish this redesign to best serve the audience, we must understand who exactly we are designing for. To do this, we need to create personas and journey maps, and use these to inform the prototype.
The Solution:
To meet the challenge of redesigning the homepage and consider the three tasks of streamlining the navigation, updating the look, and improving accessibility, we take a deeper look at the target audience of the page through personas and journey maps.
Personas
If we want to best serve the college’s audience, it’s necessary to understand the individuals that comprise it.
The three personas above each represent large portions of the UGA Engineering community, thus providing a good idea of who might be visiting the website and for what purpose.
Journey Maps
Each of the three personas has a unique perspective, and therefore will have a different purpose for visiting the college’s website. To take edits into account, journey maps must be developed to reflect each the individual’s experience visiting the site. The below is an example of Emma’s journey while interacting with the College of Engineering. The journey map includes a row specifically for her interaction with the website.
Prototype
Taking the above personas and journey map into consideration, the following prototype was created. The full file can be viewed on Figma.
The prototype includes a new interface, updated and simplified menus that target each intended audience, and an accessible design.
The interface is modernized, using a video header and sleeker design. Please note that the video header does not work on Figma, so it is shown below.
The menus are updated to take a more simplified approach, targeting each intended audience via a button they can click to get to their section of the website. The expanded menu resides under a hamburger menu so that it is less cluttered and easier to navigate.
The new design also removes the rotating image and news header, which is both inaccessible for screen readers and scrolls too quickly for any meaningful interaction.
Results:
UGA Engineering’s newly redesigned homepage reflects the college’s current position as the third largest college at UGA. The streamlined menu, modernized look, and improved accessibility were necessary updates from the 2013 design. The website meets the needs of the three personas developed for this project, which aim to represent a majority of the overall audience. The work of making edits and improvements to websites is never truly finished, but this refresh will hopefully serve the college’s audiences well for the foreseeable future.
