University of Louisiana: Website Redesign
Research and redesign of information architecture for the website of University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Scope
Time: 10 weeks
Team: Individual project
Methods: Content audit, user personas, usability testing, card sorting
Tools: Axure
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s website is the main source of information for its stakeholders. However, the website lacked important usability features such as intuitive navigation, categories, and labels.
As a part of my graduate school course in Information Architecture, I conducted user testing and research to analyze the design changes required to improve the user experience of the website.
Overview
Why
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is a university website that caters to a wide range of users - students, faculty, researchers, and recruiters. Their website acts as a go-to space for information regarding the university. It is especially important to ensure that it has a good user experience, to ensure that users find the information they are looking for and to improve and retain the number of users visiting the site.
What
I conducted user testing to understand the stakeholders’ pain points in the current website and suggested a redesign. I also created an interactive prototype of the redesigned website in Axure.
How
Through user testing and task analysis I conducted a content audit to understand the important changes that need to be made in the website. By analyzing the metadata and conducting a card sorting exercise, I revamped the sitemap of the website to improve navigation. I further redesigned the website by creating wireframes in Axure.
The Problem
The University of Louisiana’s website lacked intuitive navigation and was too cluttered. It was difficult to find information on the website and perform primary tasks.
The Solution
Focusing on these key problems, I conducted a redesign of the website by creating wireframes in Axure.
Wireframe of the About Us page
Strategy and Scope
To start my redesign process, I first analyzed the user needs and business goals of the website to accurately make design decisions
User Needs
Getting information about the university
Applying to the university
Identifying whether the university is a good fit for you
Business Goals
Attract more students and parents to apply to the university
Promoting the university
Improving the college experience for all stakeholders
Understanding the users
A university website has many stakeholders, each with different goals and expectations from the website. I decided to begin my research process by understanding the users and creating user personas. This helped me make design decisions keeping these personas in mind.
I conducted 8 semi-structured interviews to understand the various kinds of users that visit the website and the reasons they visit it. From this, I was able to identify the important tasks that I need to focus on and also empathize with the user needs.
I created user personas to empathize with the users. This helped me understand the needs of the users and what the website should do.
User Personas
Identifying primary tasks
Before analyzing the website and its information architecture to suggest changes, I found it useful to understand the different goals the users would try to achieve through the website. The website has a lot of information and thus, it is important to prioritize the information that meets these goals.
Primary tasks identified
These tasks were then used for the task flow analysis. This activity helped to understand the key pain points that users face while using the website and to further analyze the page content.
Task Flows
Starting the redesign process
I started the redesign process by conducting a content audit and creating a sitemap. After that, I moved on to the wireframing and prototyping stage.
Content Audit
The University of Louisiana had over 1500 pages that needed to be analyzed. To get a clear understanding of the content I am dealing with, I first conducted an extensive content audit that helped me analyze which content to keep, remove, or change.
Snippet of the content audit
Key Insights
Through the content audit, I was able to narrow down on five primary issues with the website
01
The website has cluttered navigation
The navigation bar has too many elements that increase the cognitive load of the users.
02
Unclear labels and categories
A significant number of labels and categories are not intuitive for the users. It is difficult for them to understand what content to expect once they select a category.
03
Irrelevant and wordy page content
Most of the pages have long paragraphs of text. The users are not able to identify the important information amongst the wordy text.
04
Lack of calls to action
Due to remote learning, it is difficult to help students learn how to use the app during class. Given the time constraint, the professor is only able to go over the basics. Without accurate guidance students will not use the app outside class.
05
The website does not cater to all the users
There is no information available for users looking for information about employment opportunities and student employment outcomes.
I kept these primary pain points and user personas at the center of my further analysis, which helped to ground the research and redesign and kept it focused on the user group that the website is catered towards.
Revamping the Navigation
The content audit helped to get a clear picture of the scope of the content. However, a primary painpoint in the user experience was navigation and the menu bar. I created a site map to restructure the old navigation bar to make it more concise. This made the content easily findable and discoverable.
In order to improve the organization and structure of the navigation, I conducted a hybrid card sorting exercise with three users to identify the optimal organization of the categories. Using the insights from the user testing, I first created a list of categories that are important for the navigation. I then asked users to organize the subcategories into the main categories as they deemed fit.
On the basis of the responses, I created the sitemap.
Redesigned sitemap
This sitemap acted as the navigation bar for the final redesigned wireframes. Following the content audit and insights from the user tests, I created interactive wireframes of the sketches on Axure.
A CLOSER LOOK INTO THE DESIGN DECISIONS
Decluttering the navigation
The main issue with the website was its cluttered navigation bar. I focused on reducing the number of subcategories. Along with this, I redesigned the drop-down so that it only opens the section the users want to see, thus reducing the cognitive load.
Making categories more intuitive
I reorganized the subcategories and changed labelings of those that were unclear to help the users find what they are looking for easily.
Catering to the target audience
I added a separate section for careers, that would help recruiters and users looking for information on student employment to access the relevant content better.
Highlighting important content
I reduced the clutter on each informational page to make it more relevant to the user needs - I made the call to action buttons more prominent and ensured that important information is not lost in the rest of the text by introducing different headings and titles.
Reflections
