SGS of the University of Toronto
2024
Website Redesign:
SGS of the University of Toronto
Project Overview
The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies (SGS) website redesign project focused on enhancing content findability to meet the targeting users' need to efficiently locate their desired information or resources within the site. We aimed to achieve maximum user experience improvement with small but pivotal changes tailored to our diverse user groups, thus contributing to a more intuitive user journey and higher user retention of the SGS website.
My Contribution
My contribution centered on conducting user research to identify usability issues, collaboratively ideating solutions, and leading wireframing and prototyping efforts to transfer into aesthetically pleasing and consistent UI designs. I also played a key role in usability testing and led the iterative refinement of our design, ensuring that the final product met the user's expectations.
1.Background Research
Our background research encompasses organizational comparison and alignment with SGS’s mission and values. We analyzed peer institutions, drawing inspiration from their navigation systems and content organization, particularly the effective use of dropdown menus and segmented user journeys. We delved into the mission and values of SGS through meetings with stakeholders and identified the goal of fostering a user-friendly and comprehensive academic resource hub. These insights informed our following user research design and solution ideation.
2. User Research
- Research and Analysis
Our user research involved survey, detailed interviews and observations across three primary user groups: prospective students, current students, and staff to understand their distinct needs and the most frequent experiences with the current website. The insights gained identified that prospective students faced obstacles in the information-gathering and application processes. Staff needed a streamlined, consistent site structure to find resources to support current students' requests. Thereby, we developed following research questions to guide the solution creation:
"How might we improve the SGS website's information navigation to ensure that it effectively meets its user groups' diverse needs by enhancing the findability of key application resources and educational support?"
We grouped data into themes to compose an affinity diagram and created detailed personas for prospective students and staff groups to identify pivotal points to align design decisions with real user needs.
3. Ideation
- Brainstorm and Prioritization
We first employed a Prioritization Grid to assess identified problems by their user impact and implementation feasibility. Concentrating on "No Brainers" themes, we pinpointed key improvements:
1. Global Navigation Improvements - add drop-down menus to the top menu; reorganize page contents; add direct "Apply" button to the top menu
2. Content Differentiation and Visual Consistency - standardize inconsistent visuals and layout, remove or hide redundant page content, apply different layout designs to differentiate content areas in the same page, rename ambiguous titles and buttons
3. Additional Feature: add filter to the program list, add anchor menus to lengthy pages
- Identifying Solutions and
User Journey Map
We decided to focus on applying the solutions to the pages and experiences related to the two key user journeys:
1. 👩🎓Sasha the Prospective Student: Explore program for applying
2. 👨🏫Ken the Staff: Helping current students to find writing support
While addressing the two key task flows, we were able to overhaul the major information structure and create a series of templates for the same type of pages.
4. Iteration
During usability testing, we revisited the SGS website redesign with our original participants to validate the new prototype's user experience. We tested the same task flows on participants followed by post-session interviews to collect qualitative and quantitative data to inform our iteration.
These informed adjustments closed gaps between our design and user intuition, significantly boosting the site's usability.
Prospective Student: Exploring program for applying
Staff: Helping current students to find writing support
6. Conclusion
Our redesign of the SGS website went through a complete UX design process from User research to iteration, which demonstrates our professional design skills and strategic planning. Looking ahead, we plan to engage in further iterations that align closely with stakeholder objectives, ensuring our solutions remain agile and responsive to evolving requirements. Collaborating with the school's development team, we will seamlessly transition our high-fidelity prototypes into live, functional web pages. We aim to solidify the SGS website as a digital resource hub for all graduate member's academic journeys.