UT Homepage Redesign
For this project, my group members and I were tasked with conducting a UX evaluation on a UT website, and prototyping a redesign to demonstrate our findings. Our main goal was to make the site more intuitive so that users could find what they're looking for among the plethora of information that UT displays. Our deliverables consisted of low fidelity wireframes that display our changes made to the site. My team consisted of students in my Intro to User Experience Design course at UT, and shared the roles of UX Researcher/Interviewer and UX Designer.
role
UX Co-Researcher, UX Co-Designer
timeline
Spring 2021 (seven weeks)
team
Myself and two other UT students
tools
Figma
UX Co-Researcher, UX Co-Designer
timeline
Spring 2021 (seven weeks)
team
Myself and two other UT students
tools
Figma
The Design Process
Our design process began with conducting a heuristic evaluation of the UT homepage and creating two lo-fi wireframes for our proposed redesign. Shown below, these wireframes addressed the heuristic violations we identified and incorporated our design solutions.
For our final redesign, we created a mid-fi prototype of two screens that built off of our initial heuristic evalution. We identified two main pain points–confusing user flow for prospective students and cluttered design elements–which could impede on a first-time user’s experience on the site.
Shown below is the first screen we redesigned from the UT homepage.
Our first step into making the site more intuitive was adding a "Prospective Students" tab to the top navigation bar to maintain consistency with the original design of having designated sections for each user. This change makes it easier for users to immediately find information that pertains to them without having to comb through the homepage.
The next major redesign we included was making the primary navigation bar collapsible so that it was easier for users to see the important information on the page. The primary navigation bar was not collapsible on the original homepage, which obscured content from view and a significant portion of the screen was consumed by this design element.
Next, our second screen consists of the UT homepage after scrolling down. Below are the before and after screens from our redesign.
Our last major change aligned with our goal to make the user's experience more intuitive by reducing the amount of clutter on the page. We determined that the background image and low contrast colors made it difficult for users to distinguish the important information, so we reduced the background to just one color. We also made the headline tab dark enough to maintain a strong contrast, allowing users to distinguish the information from the design.
future directions
With such a large amount of important content to display, creating an intuitive user flow is essential or else users can be easily misled from their intended action. By looking at the site through the lens of a prospective student, we were able to identity poor visual design elements and unnecessary obstacles that impeded on our experience as a first-time user. In the future, this redesign could be made into a high-fidelity prototype that incorporates more screens from the site and builds off of our initial heuristic evaluation to create a fully transformed homepage.