UVU Surveying and Mapping Web Pages
Website Redesign
The Surveying and Mapping Department at UVU wanted help with their website’s design, since their department’s goals were not being met by the current design. The program at the time had only 40 students enrolled, and department wanted to have more.
Beginning Design our Process
We worked with our stakeholder who is over the department, Dan Perry, to create a design that focused on student recruitment, and to push the boundaries of UVU’s design template, which he wasn’t too fond of. He wanted to have students to be able to find information they needed as well as make it attractive for students taking a look into the program.
As we conversed with Dan about some focuses of our design, and we mainly discussed what features should be added or changed, such as adding more images, having a focus on social media, and making sure that links on the website didn’t lead outside of the website.
Planning and Research
Our main target audience was undecided UVU students, so we sent out a Qualtrics Survey to gain some basic information, and then we later interviewed students for more information. After Gathering all our information, we created a persona that would represent the target user audience for the website’s redesign:
Changing the Structure
After our research we combed through the website to find anything that was missing, links that may be duplicated or that lead to nowhere, and other fatal flaws of the original website design. Each of our team members documented different pages and put everything together to then come up with a new structure for the website.
Wireframing
As a team, we all decided to take on a page each and create about 6 different sketch designs per page we decided to redesign. I decided to take on the task of redesigning the Degrees Page to be centered around not only information, but highlights of what to expect in the degree program.
This wasn’t a small task, and there was a lot on information for the Degree Program Page. In my wireframes and later higher fidelity redesigns, I added scrollable areas for the page for maximum information, providing some form of progressive disclosure, while keeping all the information on the same page. This feature, unfortunately, did not make it into the final design because the feature did not fit the UVU templates the University uses for their entire website. The inpage scroll was also not possible to prototype in Adobe XD yet, which was the program we were using.
Finalizing and Testing the High Fidelity Prototype
After abandoning the inpage scroll design, and as the project was coming closer to completion, I focused on designing the web pages with design that could be used with the programs used by UVU to edit web pages. Unfortunately, we were unable to get to experience the web tools to finalize our design to be used as is, so we came up with a simpler design that could possible inspire the team that would develop the design after we would finish. I mainly focused my design on what to add and remove from the main degree page.
After compiling the whole redesign, we moved onto testing the design. We had random students take 5 seconds with either the whole site or specific pages. It helped answer some of our questions about what stood out, and what we could upgrade based on their brief look throughs. We edited the home page icons due to the interviews.
We also had the unique opportunity to go to UVU’s Eye Tracking facility to test our design in an Eye Tracking test. The users were given tasks to go through the website, and then we were given feedback about what happened. As it turned out, the links we put in were not clicked. The major updates we made due to this type of testing were to make the buttons look more like buttons.
Project Review
As much as I am into redesigning websites, I am more of a developer than a designer, but this was a good experience for me. This helped me gain a new view on the design process, and a lot does go into it. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and miscommunication by our project manager, I felt that there was a lot our group was missing, and wished that our group could have redesigned the website one more time before submitting our design to our Stakeholder.
Chelsea Hansen is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web Design and Development. The following article relates to the Surveying and Mapping website redesign in the DGM 2240 Course and representative of the skills learned.
