How might a team of UX design students help improve the first-year experience for their fellow freshmen?
Project Description
The First Year Advising Center (FYAC) is where first year UVU students go in order to become acclimated to their college, major, and classes. More than just providing advising appointments for students, the FYAC also provides tests to see what major would fit them best, class placement testing for math and English, and an online interactive “Trail Guide” for students to use should they not have the time to meet with an advisor.
Despite the efforts made by the FYAC to help freshmen transition into a college climate, many students are continuing to drop out before finishing their first year. Improving the current website can help curb this issue if we are able to more effectively communicate the process and benefits of the first year advising center while driving more students to schedule an appointment with their advisor.
Planning & Discovery
Our first step in starting this project was interviewing the client. This allowed my group and I to gain insight into what is currently working/not working for the website, their needs/goals, and their target audience. We then planned out our steps and phases for the project throughout the rest of the semester. We planned to research our target audience, test the current site, create page wireframes, and finish off with surface comps connected together in a prototype.
Research
The vast majority of our research came in the form of learning more about our target audience. This included surveys, interviews, persona profiles, and eye-tracking tests. The surveys were our form of collecting quantitative data, which allowed us to figure out some basic demographic information of our users as well as insights as to what kind of people they are and how they interact with the site. The interviews were our qualitative data that allowed us to go more in-depth with our target audience on their experience with the First Year Advising Center and the website. The personas summed up the different "groups" of people that will be using the site. Lastly, the eye-tracking tests gave us insights into how our target audience is using the current site, and allowed us to see where they enjoyed using the site and where they were confused or frustrated.
Design
Once we got a very solid understanding of who our target audience is, it was time to get to work. Considering our target audience are young adults who have recently graduated from high school (18-20 years old), our top priorities were to create a site that had easy to digest content, straightforward processes, clean/modern aesthetics, and create a welcoming and inviting feel. We went straight ahead and began creating wireframes, with our team splitting the workload and coming together to pick our favorite parts from each wireframe to create final team wireframes.
After we figured out the structure and content to include on the website with our wireframes, we once again split the workload to create surface comps. After all the color and final content was added, we threw the surface comps together into Invision to create a click-through prototype that would give the client a first-hand experience on how the site would look, feel, and function.
Testing & Validating
As mentioned earlier, we completed eye-tracking tests on the current website to determine how well users were able to interact with the site. However, we also completed testing for our prototype near the end of the project. To compare and contrast our prototype testing results with those of the current site, we asked our users to complete the same tasks that were asked during the eye-tracking tests. This allowed us to see if our prototype improved the ease of use and efficiency of the site. Thankfully, our test results have shown that we successfully created a website design that is more simple and efficient to use to complete the most important tasks that the website was created for.
Project Retrospective
More than anything, this project taught me how important it is to take your time and do a lot of your work in the research stage of the design process. There are many projects I’ve done early on in my career where I try to quickly get to the wireframe and surface comp stage, but I end up making a lot of mistakes and end up going through many more iterations until I get it right. Spending more time in the research phase really allowed me to understand who is using my website and what features/design choices they would benefit from using, which made the subsequent wire-frame stage very easy and quick to go through. It’s almost like building with Legos from an instruction sheet.
Overall, I believe the redesign of the First Year Advising Center website turned out great. We addressed the client’s wishes of having a website where content is better structured and more easily digested while providing further emphasis and call to actions on scheduling an appointment. The aesthetics are improved as well, and aligning itself closer with the design of the main UVU website further solidifies its identity. It will be exciting to see if my or any of the other group’s redesigns are implemented as I believe we all did a fantastic job at improving the First Year Advising Website.