The Information Systems & Technology Department at Utah Valley University describes itself as a way to “bridge the gap between technology and business”. I was asked to help offer suggestions on their website redesign because of how difficult it is to navigate their website as prospective students seem to struggle to find the information about classes, advisors, degrees, and potential jobs.
Goals: ​
Complete research studies to design a new website that will connect better for concurrent enrollment students.Â
Learn how to work with a group of 3 other people by taking turns being team lead and turning in a finished design and research to the clients.Â
Audience: ​
Concurrent Enrollment Students. See the persona below.Â
Our Persona
Each group was given a different potential audience that would need the website. We were given concurrent enrollment students and made a persona to help us do our research and design. Her name is Hannah Ekers and she was made using ideas that we had since we have been concurrent enrollment students and by interviewing and talking to high school students.
Researching, researching, and did I mention we did some researching?
About 80% of the semester was doing research! It was very interesting to learn about all the different kinds of research that can be done to make sure a website is well made or how to change a website.Â
Here is a list of all the tests that were performed and some information on how we did them.Â
Site Audit: We assigned different pages to different group members and each looked over our pages cataloging all the information on each page.Â
Heuristic Evaluation: As we did the site audit listed above, we also cataloged all the problems we could see on the pages. We found many problems. Including broken links, inaccurate information, inconsistent design, and a lack of organization.Â
Survey: We used assumptions we had on our persona and made a survey we gave out to different high school students to complete.Â
Interviews: We completed two interviews using family members that we had in our group to ask more questions on the experience concurrent enrollment students had in regards to researching college.Â
Eye Tracing: We invited a past concurrent enrollment student to join our class one day so we could test his abilities to find different information on the old site.Â
Now what?Â
Once we did all the research, we looked over our finds and found that the site didn’t speak to the needs of high school students. Many high school students wonder how they are going to pay for school and want to make sure they can contact an advisor and easily find information on the degrees available. We learned that the site made it difficult to learn information and we were able to make a working prototype of the site that fixes those problems.
Difficulties of working with a team
The hardest part of this whole semester was figuring out how to work with a team. At first, I wasn’t worried too hard about this part since I have worked on group projects before and seemed to get along with my assigned group members, but I soon found out the hardships of communication and getting along with people that have different design ideas. There was one member of our group that would never communicate with the rest of us and seemed to do things without telling us. It made it really hard to get work done with everything seeming to change without notice. I was lucky though as the rest of my team seemed to equally find this frustrating and together we found ways to overlook it. Each week during our meetings we would talk about any obstacles and made sure to mention how important communication was. We also had a group text and I found that the more we were open and messaging in the group text the more she would say as well.
Results
Although there were some obstacles along the way, we were able to learn alot about the design process and were able to turn in a finished design to our clients. They didn’t use our design, but the team outside of our class that did design the website used our feedback and research to make a great working site that is able to more clearly share information and ideas to any student that is looking. I also learned more about working with a team and got some great ideas on how to improve in the future.