Redesigning the AED Department Site
architecting and designing for a different brand of architect and designer
Project Description
The Architecture and Engineering Design department at Utah Valley University is one of the oldest at the school. It has a rich history, a lot of past and current success, and a ton of really cool projects (some involving drones!). You’d never guess that by looking at their website, though. In fact, their site is so bad, and they’re so embarrassed by it that they make a conscious effort to avoid telling people to visit it. It’s hard to navigate and it doesn’t even begin to tell the story of this great department. For this project, we were tasked with redesigning it. Our main goals were to increase usability and to turn this site into something the department can be proud to show off.
Planning & Discovery
To begin the design process, we met with the heads of the department to discuss their goals for the site, among other things. From this, we gained crucial insights into the project like who the site’s target demographic was, what they were hoping to see on their site, and why they wanted a redesign in the first place.
Research
Meeting with our stakeholders was incredibly informative, but there were still some pieces missing. To fill in these informational gaps, we conducted interviews with students and sent out surveys to people within our target demographic (college students, high schoolers, and parents of middle schoolers) in order to figure out peoples’ expectations for such a site, as well as more general information like what they find most fulfilling and interesting when deciding on a potential career path.
Design
Armed with this knowledge, we hit the ground running. We began by taking inventory of the information and features already on the site — Analyzing, prioritizing, and organizing.
After we figured out the structure of our site and the way we wanted to architect the information, we began working on the visual design. We started with rough sketches and wireframes and eventually iterated our way up to a high-fidelity surface comp.
Testing & Validating
With our site completed, we created a prototype and we were ready for testing. First, we tested the existing site to get a baseline and confirm our assumptions about the site. Participants were asked to do a verbal walkthrough of the landing page and then complete a series of tasks that users would commonly come to the site for: finding an advisor and information about scholarships and programs. Our assumptions turned out to be true: the site was confusing to navigate and didn’t offer much insight into what the program was really about.
We then tested our version of the site, asking participants to complete the same tasks, but adding some additional tasks to test new features we had added — like a calendar feed. Participants were able to complete the tasks much more easily than on the original site. We were also made aware of some minor tweaks that could be made to further perfect our site, which we quickly implemented.
You can view the prototype for yourself here.
Project Retrospective
This project was a very insightful and eye-opening experience. I was a little intimidated at first because it was my first time working through the entire design process on a project for a real client. It had its challenges, but I learned a lot. This was also one of my first experiences working with a team on a long-term project, so I also learned a lot about how to be the type of team member that others enjoy working with and that they can count on to deliver.
Taylor Fletcher is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. This article relates to the final project in the DGM 2240 (Interaction Design) course and representative of the skills learned.
