DILEMMA
Accumulation of technical debt due to larger systemic problems made the management of the website harder to maintain and more technically challenging. The root cause of this was a poor handoff between a third-party development team and the internal centralized web team. As result, the website was largely custom code with on-page stylings and elements.
A Design Silo was created at the university. This was due to conflicting web templates with varying frameworks. As result, web assets were exclusively created from The Graduate School while the rest of the university’s websites utilized a shared repository.
OBJECTIVE
Improve the user experience of users
Reduce the amount of technical debt accumulated in the backend due to new feature rollouts.
Remove The Graduate School from the design silo and share web assets from a common repository managed by the centralized university web team.
MY ROLE
Project Manager
UI Designer / Developer
UX Researcher
Information Architect
PROCESS
In order to complete this project, I utilized a traditional Waterfall Method. This method was ideal due the busy schedules of stakeholders and the scope being to improve an existing website. There was not a need for constant stakeholders feedback in the redesign process. I partnered with academic subject matter experts and the university’s centralized web team. Below are the stages of the project I implemented.
The UX Methods implored during this project were as follows:
Heuristic Evaluation
Web Analytics Evaluation
Stakeholder Feedback Gathering
Usability Sessions
Content Inventory & Strategy
Requirements Gathering
A list of functional desires were collected through the life of the 1st website iteration (2 years). The sources of this feedback came from academic stakeholders, university web governance policies, and accessibility laws. These desires were vetted, prioritized, and validated through the analysis of web analytics that identified the areas of improvement.
The following requirements were gathered:
Shortened URLs: Recruitment and marketing teams sought to shorten the website’s URLs to make the URLs simple and memorable. Optimizing SEO efforts was an added benefit as well.
Removal of subdirectories: From a web maintenance perspective, the removal of unnecessary subdirectories would make the websites backend less complicated and easier to maintain.
Top Navigation: A highly valued ask from The Deans of The Graduate School was a top navigation bar with submenus for in the 1st iteration the websites. However, due to the original web template it was not technically feasible to implement. Despite efforts improve the Information Architecture (IA) of the website, stakeholders still desired a submenu structure for the top navigation. User feedback supported this desire as users found it difficult to find deeper-level information items.
Migrate news stories into news site: A shift in internal web governance policies requested that stories, and news items be placed into a news site. This was an effort to reduce the amount of content in the university’s domain and improve the accuracy of internal web search results due to search system constraints.
Highlighted Student Research: Recruitment stakeholders desired a place to highlight current student accomplishments and announcements in a way that was not buried deep into the websites (IA).
Directory / Listings Design: We discovered over time that our listing directory asset was problematic with technical issues. We sought to redesign this asset and implement a better solution.
System Design & Development
Once the requirements were gathered, we began strategizing about solutions. Our first step was to design a content strategy for the new website. The content strategy allowed us organize our content.
Content Strategy
The first step of our content strategy was to take inventory of the artifacts that we had in our web directories.
We then divided the content into two buckets based on two audience segments:
Internal Audience: This audience being individuals who are currently associated with Augusta University seeking information.
External Audience: This audience being individuals who are not currently associated with Augusta University seeking information about the university’s offerings.
This was primarily done because an enterprise level project had started to implement an intranet for internal audiences. This required each college and business unit to identify which content they wanted be migrated to the intranet and which content would stay on the client-facing website.
Finally, we identified which content would be appropriate to migrate to our newly developed WordPress news site.
Information Architecture
The progress from the content strategy fed into the Information Architecture Strategy. We established a wireframe of the proposed architecture of the website. The architecture was influence by various sources:
The Previous web IA
Other Graduate School IAs
Feedback from users on the challenges of finding specific types of content.
Information Architecture Wireframe for The Graduate School’s primary website.
Once the IA was established for the website, the content migration began from the old web templates to the new web templates. Along this came the requirement of redesigning the assets to new dimensions and molding the content to fit the new UI layout.
UI Design
The design of the new website has a more modern feel that the previous website template. We made a lot of changes to layout and dimensions of content with the new web template. Below it displays the most visibility pronounced changes. The first being the top navigation and the second being the listing page template used throughout the website.
Top Navigation
Listing Directory Template
Usability Testing
Once we had a functioning prototype of the website, we conducted a usability study with 8 student participants. They were given 5 tasks. This allowed us to take a step back from the build and see if our thought process with making design, navigation, and layout choices fit the expectations of users who will interact with our websites.
Usability Session Questions & Results
Q1: You are a current student and you would like to find out information about the dissertation process. How would you find this information on The Graduate School’s Website?
6 out of 6 participants found this information easily without any hesitation.
The navigation and grouping logic made sense. Student locate the information in a matter of three deliberate clicks.
Takeaways: No changes or suggestion were made as a result of these findings.
Q2: Now, you would like to find a PhD student form that you need to get signed by your mentor. The name of the form is the “Comprehensive Examination Pre-Approval Form.” How would you find this?
6 out of 6 participants found this form very easily.
None had issues navigating on-page to find the specific form
6 out of 6 participants found the layout simple and intuitive.
Takeaways: No changes or suggestions were made as a result of these findings.
Q3: Now, imagine that you are a prospective student who is interested in the Doctor of Education program. You would like to see what the admission requirements are for this program. How would you find this?
6 out of 6 eventually found the information
6 out of 6 did not have any difficulty with finding the requested information on the program specific admission requirements page.
3 out of 6 participants initially attempted to find the admission requirements for the program by going the program listing page. Once they discovered the link to the listing page was dead, they proceeded to the admission requirements listing page.
3 out of 6 participants went directly to the admission requirements listing page.
2 out of 6 participants experienced difficulty when they clicked off of our website to other websites (Admissions and Education). They pursued around until they eventually found a link the TGS admission requirements page.
Key takeaways: Paths and navigation outside of our website are very important. Broader implications need to be considered.
Q4: Now, imagine that you are interested in learning more about the PhD in Biomedical Sciences Program. Specifically, you would like more information about the offerings for Neuroscience. How would you find this information?
6 out of 6 participants found access to the Biomedical Sciences program website without any issues.
5 out of 6 participants scrolled down the homepage in seek of a path to information on the neuroscience program.
6 out of 6 participants did not click on the “Program Offerings” navigation item on the TGS website to find information on the PhD in Biomedical Sciences program. They all clicked on the “PhD in Biomedical…” menu item.
6 out of 6 participants did not realize that they had entered a new website. They all thought that they were still on the TGS website.
Key Takeaways: We should consider having a direct path to the programs on the homepage of the Biomedical Sciences website. There also needs to be some distinction between the TGS website and Biomedical Sciences websites.
Q5: Lastly, you are a new graduate student at Augusta University, and you have heard a lot about the Three-Minute Thesis competition. You understand that it is an opportunity for students to present their research in three minutes, but you would to have more information. How would you find this on The Graduate School’s website?
3 out of 6 participants: 1st click was to Events page followed by a click to News page. When questioned post-task, these students expressed that they thought that the competition is an event and they assumed that there was a story written about previous competitions where they could find a path to 3MT competition information.
2 out of 6 participants did not make a connection between the category “Opportunities” and “3MT”
6 out 6 participants: Eventually navigated to the 3MT webpages.
6 out 6 participants were able to locate the 2018 1st place winner of the 3MT competition
Key Takeaways: Consider a path to 3MT from the Events page. Also, when a recap story is written about 3MT competition winners, ensure that there is link to the 3MT page in the story.
Launch
After the conducting the usability tests, we were able to validate some the changes we strategized about while implementing new changes based on the feedback we gathered from users. This allowed us to make an even bigger impact on the user experience. While we were not able to implement all of the feedback into the website for the launch of the website, this feedback was gathered in order to incorporate in future updates.