Usability Case Study and Redesign — Brown University

Lou DumDel
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

The university

Brown University is an american Ivy League school located in Providence (Rhode Island) founded in 1764, it’s one of the oldest and most prestigious school of the country. If you consider every departement, there’s over 9 000 students and more than 630 full time teachers. If you look at the town of Providence, the Brown buildings easily occupy 1/3rd of the city.

The website

I asked my roommate to be the guinea pig for this exercise. The sentence that most qualifies the website as you’re exploring it is “messiness in an organised form”. You lose yourself almost instantaneously and even coming back on the Home page can be difficult. When you’re looking for something, using the search bar can be easier than looking for the information by using their menus. The worst part happens when you encounter the different departements of the university, if you click on the “School of engineering” part, it opens up as a new website, pretty much detached from the main Brown one… So if you’re just browsing around, looking at everything the university proposes, you’re going to find yourself in trouble pretty quickly…

The school mascot

Finding the school mascot didn’t take too much time since my roommate went for it in a pretty logical way. If you directly go to “Campus Life” and “Athletics & recreation” you find that the school team is called the Brown Bears so here you have it (or almost). We actually found out later by chance that the mascot is actually called “Bruno the Bear”…

Arabic course

Finding if the school offers foreign langage instruction for Arabic wasn’t a piece of cake either. You get lost in the different academics menus, he finally made it by using the Center for langage studies > Courses > Courses Fall 2018. It would have been much easier to use the search bar that gives the answer straight away. One more time, that’s nice if you already know what you’re looking for but not so much for browsing…

The airport directions

Finally, I made him look for the directions from the closest airport… and this one was clearly the worst. Again, if you don’t start on the main page, you can spend eternity and hope to get lucky finding it. If you start on the general Brown landing page though it gets easier. If you scroll down a bit you can see on the left a “Get directions” link which takes you to the page “Driving Directions & Parking”, you’re now thinking “That’s it ! I found it !” But no, you didn’t. Nowhere on this page is mentionned an airport… To find it you’ll have to go back to “Visit Brown” on the left side menu and then, in the middle of the text somewhere you’ll find little red tag (amongst others of course) mentioning a certain “T.F. Green Airport” and all they say about it is that it’s “10 miles south in Warwick, RI.”. Would it be so hard just putting a simple paragraph in their “Get directions” section about this airport ?? I’m feeling like that would be the minimum 😃 I don’t even want to know how much time it took my roommate and me to find that awfull little line of text… if you’re using the search bar to find that info just F.Y.I. you’ll get the direction straight away but you’ll suddenly be on the “Computer science” department website… If you understand why, please explain the logic to us.

Trying to simplify easily the website

So many pain points… I decided to just focalise about this different websites in one situation. I figured that just adding some scrolling menus would already help the user browsing without losing himself. The other change I decided to operate was to get rid of these famous different websites for the different departement to keep a main root, which I think will also make the browsing easier.

On the left the main page, on the right the main page with a scolling menu appearing if you put your mouse over the “Academics” section
the “School of Engineering” integrated in the main website

And finally, when browsing amongst the academics I figured that maybe it would be easier to understand if the different courses etc were positioned like a genealogic tree ?

Lou DumDel

Written by

UX UI Design student @Ironhack 🚀

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