Role
I was the sole UX designer and website builder on a team comprising of a product owner (the Associate CIO for Research), content writer, and researcher. I was responsible for managing the overall design and development process of this project, while collaborating with the rest of the team on ideation and written content. I was also responsible for ongoing maintenance of this website.
Analysis
The Problem
User research showed that researchers were having a hard time knowing what is available to them. An R1 university, new office that helps merge Researchers and their IT needs. So many resources and services available, but not one place that brings them together for people to know what is available.
Objective
To provide one online location for researchers to have access to a catalog of all technologies, platforms, and services available at the university in the areas of Research Computing, Research Cyberinfrastructure, and Research Data.
Target Users
Design
The goal was to keep the website easily navigate-able for users, and to provide them with not just information they already know, but to also allow them to learn about additional relevant services that can be better utilized for their projects and research.
Development
Considering the content of the website will be edited by other members of the team in the future, I assured to create content types, forms, and the layout of the content type forms to be intuitive and user friendly. I developed the website in Drupal, utilizing PhP, CSS, and HTML to customize things.
I also enjoy working in Adobe Illustrator and created customized icons for this website.
Evaluation
To ensure usability, I scheduled some user testing where I provided a task for the user to implement and observed their actions. I also did quality assurance testing on the website myself to ensure that the content and website was correct and working properly.
The product manager and team were highly satisfied with the website design and development. In the annual unit all-staff meeting, the Associate CIO for Research shared the success of this project and the data showing the positive impact to all the staff and seniors.
Challenges
During ideation, we went through several possibilities for how to categorize the numerous services available at the university. We wanted to categorize in a manner that allowed users to easily know where to navigate for the relevant services they may be looking for. We made our decision on the categories that were not too broad in description so to not leave a user guessing where to go, and not too narrow where there would be overwhelmingly too many categories to sift through in the first place.