Prework Final Case Study

Here I am once again writing about my experiences doing Ironhack's prework for my UX/UI bootcamp. This is, though, the last task before the real thing begins (just can't wait for the classes!!)

So, the challenge here was to pick an American university web from a list (I chose The University of Tennessee Knoxville, because… Tennessee!!! S2 unforgettable place!) and then, find a friend to be the user and watch her navigating the website.

The first impression I got from the interviewed person was: "Wow! It's a modern web. I was expecting something more conservative, as in a traditional institution, or something like that!". This was caused by a big scuba diver picture as the first thing you see when you access the web.

But when she started navigating, the scuba picture turned out to be a little confusing, because it was part of a "volunteer stories" highlight, that you can hide to go to the main menu. She hided it and showed it again a couple of times until she decided to scroll the page.

Then, I asked her to do 3 tasks:

• Find the school mascot
• See if the school offers foreign language instruction for Arabic
• Find the nearest airport to the school

Here goes some skechtnoting of this process:

As you can see, finding the airport was easy, but she couldn't find the mascot (is there any?) and even found an error page while trying to access the bobblehead shop (oops!)…

But the main pain point discovered was actually in a task that she could do: discover if the school offers foreign language instruction for Arabic. The answer was no! Not only there's nothing for Arabic, but there's no information in any other language besides a brochure in Chinese.

It's understandable that maybe it's not important to the business to have a multi-language web, once the university is in the USA, the classes are in English and the clients are supposed to speak English.

But the problem is: they do have a whole section in the website for global engagement, international students, international education and also the main highlight (remember the scuba diver?) for "Volunteers that come from all over the globe to make an impact worldwide."

The University wants to market a great program calling it Global and everything, so the downloadable Chinese brochure sounds like not enough, right?

Thinking of that, and also considering that it's not important to have all the web content in multi-language, my suggestion to solve this problem was to add the language switch menu only in the "global engagement" section, where all the information for foreign students is found.

When you click on "Global engagement"at the left side menu at the Homepage you are directed to the respective page, with multiple languages choices on the top right menu.

This case study was interesting because I had the opportunity to think and find improvements to a nice web. I used to associate "improving a web" to redesign an ugly and nonfunctional website. And I could conclude that sometimes even a modern and updated web can use some suggestions and adjusts.