christine forni
ux + UI design
Project Overview
STC's Arizona Chapter reached out to ASU's technical communication's department for student volunteers to work on their site redesign. The redesign was completed using the Agile methodology and used Wordpress to create the new site. I worked with a scrum team tasked with the important task of handling the homepage. We were also given the target demographic of students, which we used to develop a persona for reference. I lead the design direction and research, and wrote the majority of the copy.
Goals
Modernize the website, improve information architecture, create clear CTA to drive enrollment
Challenges
Different needs based on user groups and permission levels, making complex data relationships navigable
Methods
Direct feedback, user interviews, heuristic evaluation, iterative design
Results
Delivered a highly requested feature to users, with immediate positive feedback and user engagement
Design Process
We started the redesign by creating personas and user stories for the main audiences for the site: students, tech comm professionals, and employers. My scrum team focused on students, and collaborated on key points for the student persona, which I compiled and created the final persona from. After finalizing the personas and user stories, we began developing copy for them. We divvied up the user stories and wrote pages that answered the goals/questions of the personas. I wrote the copy for the internships page for students.
After the pages were written, we turned our focus to the information architecture. I collaborated with the project lead to design a card sorting exercise for the page links. From the exercise we determined that we would keep the links organized by audience, so that users could easily find the links meant for them. Pages that didn't fall under a clear audience category or applied to all audience members were moved to the main navigation (such as calendar and contact). We also decided to introduce an additional category for members, as pre-existing members would have different goals on the site than users new to the STC.
With the navigation figured out, I began designing and writing copy for the homepage. I knew we needed the CTA button (enrollment for the STC) to be the main focus, as well as a brief introduction to who the STC is. I also wanted to make the homepage feel modern, since the old site had been so outdated. After finalizing all of the copy and the homepage design, I suggested we do some user testing to make sure users were able to accomplish the main goals we had identified. Because the project was so small, and being done in the volunteers' spare time, we decided that we would opt for unmoderated remote testing. I wrote up four different tests in Typeform with goals specific to the individual personas. We then sent out the different tests to members of their respective audiences, with a minimum of five test takers per test.
I compiled the results and explained them to the team, pointing out common issues and suggesting how to fix them. We collaborated on implementing the solutions, and with that closed out the project.
Takeaways
This project was my first experience with trying to juggle large teams with disparate schedules and areas of expertise. I ended up taking on a leadership role so I could delegate appropriately and manage some work myself, as well as partner more closely with the project head. It was also my first experience with Agile/scrum methodologies, which taught me a lot about project management.
I also gained a lot of insight into modernizing old sites, understanding how design trends change over time and adopting current design trends with future proofing in mind.