Role: UX Designer and UX Researcher. In charge of low-fidelity & high-fidelity prototype design and user testing. Communicated presentation to stakeholder
Teams:
Collaborated with a team of UX designer and Project Manager (Professor). Presented final design to stakeholders: Student User and UCSC IT Department Developers.
The current website used by the UC Santa Cruz Undergraduate Research department is outdated and filled with inconsistency in design and 404 errors. These errors and inconsistency in design significantly impacted the user experience from our research findings. In this UX project we aimed to build an updated website design for the UC Santa Cruz undergraduate research department. It is a class project lead by professor Leila Takyama and we were successfully selected by the IT department for the official website design consideration.
Problem
Currently, one way to be involved in undergraduate research is to use the UCSC undergraduate research website; the website, however, the UX and UI are outdated and not user-centered designed. Thus we thought, how might we make Undergraduate research more visible, digestible and helpful to UC Santa Cruz students.
Hypothesis
We hope our updated website design could improve the overall student interaction as well as inspiring more students to actively participate in research during undergrad.
Solution
We conducted UX research as the first phase of our project to analyze the scope of the project problem as well as the existing pain-points in users. Then the seconds phase, I worked as a UX designer alongside the design team mate to create the low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototype via Figma. I also participated in presenting our design to the stakeholders such as program director of UCSC Website Design and the Project Manager (Professor Leila Takayama)
Outcome
Our design was successfully selected by the IT department for official website UI design consideration. Currently the UGR website is undergoing development and we hope our project will have a positive impact on the future of undergraduate student research.
Heuristic Analysis Result (Contribution of UX Researchers and me)
From our initial user testing we found:
Low visibility of system status
No 404 error page
No home page button nor error prevention
Design and Readability Issues:
Inconsistent design language to the newest 2022 UCSC Websites.
Certain links and buttons that lead to 404 error.
Home page button is too small and the UC Santa Cruz logo does not take the user back to UGR Home Page.
Text heavy which lead to users stating it is difficult to find information they are looking for.
Incorrect color contrasting which increase cognitive load on the users.
We then created the following User Persona from our initial user testing.
UGR User Persona (Designed by me)
Design Process & Prototypes
After conducting the research process, a team of designers including me brainstormed the user flow of the updated website.
Low Fidelity Paper Prototype V1
We then conducted user testing on the V1 Paper prototypes to validate our design and further iterate
Low Fidelity Interactive Paper Prototype V2
Home Page & Engineering Division Page
Research Postings Page & For Students Page
Field Research Page (Elkhorn Slough Reserve) & Student Organization
Faculty Page & Lab Data Base
High-Fidelity Prototype
A team of UX designers and I collaborated together on the final high fidelity prototype via Figma.
Design Validation: User Testing
Usability Testing
After the High - Fidelity design was complete we tested with 10 users and stakeholders to see how has the over all UX performance, friendliness and aesthetic improved over all.
The test was conducted in-person with the Interactive Prototype on Figma
To validate our final High-Fidelity Prototype we used the same Usability Scale Survey we created in our Idea and Research Phase for consistency and comparison purposes
Outcome and Conclusion
Our design was successfully selected by the IT department for official website UI design consideration.
This design challenge inspired me to explore options to increase user engagement in the Terms of Service UX. I believe this concept could provide value to not only Instagram but also all Social Media companies with big data being shared with users.
This project is in collaboration with Professor Leila Takayama, Erica Fong, Eric Nguyen, Kaylin Wang and Aman Mehrotra
