QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY
Faculty of Health Sciences Re-design
Within the Faculty of Health Sciences, at Queen's University, there are over 20 departments. Working as a Marketing and Communications Assistant, part of my portfolio has been to continually build, design, and update these departmental websites; And on separate occasions, train department website editors. I will link out to some of my most notable web pages but will focus on one major project to showcase here.
This project involved the redesign of the Faculty of Health Sciences homepage. Once upon a time, this homepage was used as a launchpad to direct traffic to other school websites within the Faculty. The previous design of the website caused confusion amongst our audience about where to get their information from. The purpose of this project was to design a hub for students, faculty, and staff from all three schools to get the latest news and stories. This project was completed in the span of 3 weeks. I was tasked with user testing, research, analysis, and design.
Team: Saif Elmaghraby, Michael Ferguson, Jennifer Valberg, and Elizabeth Cooper
THE CHALLENGE
Although the Faculty's homepage housed all of the important news and information for the three schools, our audience spent little to no time on it. We wanted to increase the amount of time a user spent on this homepage as well as improve the way we displayed our news and stories.
THE PROBLEM
We hypothesized that the reason users were not spending any time on this page, was that our content was hidden underneath three big red buttons. Each of those button linked to the school's own separate website. Users would often think that news and stories, pertaining to them, would be under their respective school.
This realization posed a couple of questions:
1. How do we absorb more traffic?
2. How do we personalize the experience?
3. How do we redesign the website to become more engaging?
USER TESTING
We decided that instead of linking out to external stories, we'd create our own stories and showcase it on the homepage of the website. The stories were tagged and a filtration system was created. That way, we could track each category's analytics. This initial design was then put through a user testing phase. We reached out to 5 students, 5 faculty members, and 5 staff members. All of which were our main audience demographic.
We asked each person to share their screen as we recorded them and then asked them to perform certain tasks. Tasks that would show us the paths they took to navigate through the websites. Here's an example of some of the tasks:
1. You heard that your colleague has recently been appointed as the new director of the School of Medicine, how would you go about finding that information?
2. Your friend has been featured on the dean's blog, how would you go about finding that blog?
3. You are looking for information regarding Indigenous students within our faculty, how would you go about that information?
*It's important to note, that these tasks were designed to be as unbiased and open as possible to allow for our user testers to show us their full navigation flow.
At the end of those tests, the recording was transcribed and analyzed.
PATTERNS IN FEEDBACK
After analyzing the user tests, we looked for patterns. Things people mentioned that seem to be a reoccurring issue. Some of the things mentioned were;
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Each tag should have an identifier colour
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The advanced search button was not visible.
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Images seemed clustered and text overlays were not dark enough.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
After going through all the feedback, we adjusted our design and we were good to go. The homepage was now a story hub. It included a filtration system as well as an advanced search option. Each category had its own little subpage that housed all tagged categories. Navigating through the website was smooth, and simplified.
THE FINAL DESIGN
HOMEPAGE
STORY PAGE
GROUPED STORY PAGE
