UT Austin International Office

Website Evaluation and Redesign

Project Overview

Platform: Website

Group Members: 20 Members of a Design Thinking course

Tools I Used: Google Analytics & Adobe Photoshop

Project Type: Mass Group

My Contribution: Google Analytics Analysis | Interface Designer

Project Duration: 2 Months

The International Office for the University of Texas at Austin requested the help of 20 master's students in a Design Thinking II  course at the University to help redesign the website, This project was a unique opportunity for both the stakeholders and our class. The stakeholders were able to get feedback on the direction for their website redesign quickly, and our class got to experience splitting a major project into pieces owned by smaller teams to rapidly complete and piece together one wholistic deliverable. 

The Process...

Stakeholder Meeting

We started this project by meeting with the International Office web development, marketing, and business teams in order to better understand the overall goals for the website redesign. 

 

Project Goals:

 

• Strengthen brand recognition

• Improve the overall user experience

• Increase user engagement

• Improve site information architecture

• Design for user self-service

• Responsive web page

 

With these goals in mind, we split into smaller teams to take on different aspects of this project quickly. 

Initial Research

We started this project by identifying key research categories: data analysis from user feedback via surveys conducted by the stakeholders, competitive evaluation of other international school websites, running a heuristic evaluation of redesign mockups created by the stakeholder team, website analytics, testing the information architecture of the site, and surveying individuals who often answer customer support questions. 

Below are the presentations made by each research team. I was on the Google Analytics team. 

User Survey Data Analysis

Google Analytics Analysis

Competitive Evaluation

Tree Testing

Heuristic Evaluation of Existing Designs

Expert Feedback

After each team had made their presentation to the rest of the class to share discoveries and implications of their research, we created an overview presentation to make to stakeholders during our final meeting.

Design 

From the findings in our first round of research, we split into new teams based on personal interest to focus, in-depth, on different components of the redesign. 

Information Architecture

Based on the findings from the Card Sorting and Tree Test research, our team proposed two different information architecture structures, User Based and Task Based.