Revamping ACM-W Website
ACM-W SRM Student Chapter is focused on the upliftment of women across all the fields in Computing. The website must host complete information about our work as a community and the resources we use or create. The aim is to provide comprehensive information about our ACM-W chapter and the work done in this community. The User Experience has to be simple and should provide all the information with the minimum amount of clicks from the user. The information, despite being extensive, should be aesthetically pleasing to watch and browse through.
Why was a revamp required?
The previous website displayed inadequate and old information about the activities, projects, blogs and events managed by the chapter. The current community has over 40 members, and the website consisted of only six core members.
Apart from that, most students or teachers were facing issues in communication regarding recruitments and collaborations for events. Most of the information was not readily available, making it difficult for our audience to understand our work. Thus, the team decided that it was time we redesigned the website.
Before I started the research, our team conducted multiple meetings to develop fundamental ideologies and long term goals for the website, which acted as guidelines for the research and the preparation of forms for the survey.
User Research
I started the project by interviewing teachers, students and members of the community. After carefully constructing the survey, we find out that most people visiting the website would be students who want to join us or associations which would like to collaborate with us on any event. However, keeping in mind our role as a community, the second category of users would be people trying to learn from the works or participate in workshops, hackathons, and seminars.
Using the survey results, I created two personas that embody the traits of the target audience.
Personas
Information Architecture
The first step of planning the website's structure began with grouping all our research findings into features. After deciding on the basic features, I decided to have a call with the team members asking them to rate those features on a “How much do we need this?” scale. This helped me to come up with the information architecture.
Sketching
After finalising our architecture, I jumped straight to sketching some of my ideas. This exercise helped me accumulate all the features into frames and add important CTAs, such as forms, cards, etc. After using pen and paper, it was time to start with Figma finally. Keeping in mind that our developers are also students trying to learn, I tried to develop something easy to implement yet aesthetically pleasing.
Testing
After showing the low-fidelity wireframes to the users, I discovered which area of designs needed improvements. Thus, based on the feedback, I came up with solutions to those issues.
Final Designs
Check it yourself!
You can see the finished website for yourself! Let us know what you feel, and we’re always open to feedback! Thank you for reading.
