Redesigning UCI’s Informatics Website

New Designs for subsections of UCI Informatics Website

Project Overview

The Informatics Program at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) has always been a major that many people don't know about. Many people discover the field of Informatics on their own rather than through the UCI Informatics website. In this project, our team is redesigning subsections of UCI's Informatics Website to promote the field of Informatics and help users understand what Informatics is.
Project for Redesigning UCI's Informatics Webpages

The Design Question

How might we redesign subsections of UCI's Informatics Website to improve its usability and help users find their desired information?

About the Project

Team Members

  • Di-Yun Cheng (myself) - UX Designer
  • Bryan Sturm - UX Designer
  • Caleb Hao-En Cheng - UX Designer
  • Ashley Kira Ly - UX Designer
  • Kevin Li - UX Designer

Project Duration

  • November - December 2022 (4 weeks)

Tools Used

  • Figma, Webflow, Google Docs

User Research

Conducting User Interview

To begin with, one of the constraints that we faced during the user research process is that we are given a list of potential target users that we have to choose from instead of allowing our self to explore our design problem and find our own target users. Eventually, we chose the target user group that consist of "UCI students who want to become a front-end developer/software engineer" as we believe this user group closely aligns with our initial idea of who our target users are.

Overall, in the user research stage, our group's goal is to conduct primary research through the use of semi-structured interviews to gain insights on user's needs, requirements, and motivations. Together, we came up with a series of interview questions aimed to help our team discover our target user's thoughts on our design problems. After we are set on our interview questions, each member was responsible to conduct interviews on their own or with a note-taker.

At this time, I find interviewing to be challenging because of my inexperience in semi-structured interviews. This is my first time conducting user interviews for a UX Project and I wasn't familiar with the process at the beginning and was unsure on how to approach users for interviews.
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I overcame this challenge by by researching online how to conduct semi-structured user interviews. Then, I analyze the steps through resources/guides and refined the interview protocols that was constructed beforehand with the team to including a additional sets of predetermined questions with follow-up questions on the topic.

After conducting a total of 11 total user interviews as a team for the project, we analyze our results and came up with the key takeaways from our target user group. The key takeaways we found are: 
  • Most people were exposed to the field of Informatics on their own.
  • Clubs such as Design@UCI are helpful for students to learn more about design.
  • The Informatics program should add additional lower-division courses.
  • Some interviewees believe that UCI Informatics should promote and advertise its programs more.

Interview Questions
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List of interview questions

Persona

In total, 2 personas were created using a community template on Figma to reflect the insights taken away from our user interviews. I contributed to Lily's persona with the team while completing Taylor’s persona on my own. The persona for Lily is created to reflect those that are in university and seeking to understand what Informatics is. Taylor's persona is created to reflect a first-year student that encountered unpleasant experiences while using the UCI Informatics Website. To present the unpleasant experiences, I included a “Frustrations” section in Taylor’s persona to highlight potential design areas that our project can focus on. Overall, our group believed that these two personas are accurate depictions of our target user group based on our user research data.
Persona for Lily Cheung
Persona for Taylor Jackson

User Story
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“As Taylor, I want to be able to understand the field of Informatics and its relations with UI/UX, so I can obtain the required skills to build effective websites.”

Prototypes

Low-Fidelity Prototypes

In this stage of the project, I was responsible for creating 3 wireframes that represent our redesign ideas shown below which captures the design ideas our team came up with during our ideation sessions. Specifically, I created a wireframe for the home page, the department’s vision page, and the B.S. Informatics Degree Page as we believe that these are the pages that are most visited and important to our users.
Low-fidelity prototype of home page of UCI Informatics
Low-fidelity prototype of department vision page of UCI Informatics
Low-fidelity prototype of UCI Informatics Degrees Page

Mid-Fidelity Prototypes

Mainly, the mid-fidelity prototype was created using the low-fidelity prototype created above. We believe the ideas shown in the mid-fidelity prototypes achieve our main design solution. However, since this project was constructed under limited time, we were not able to develop a high-fidelity interactive prototype and no user-testing was conducted during the duration of this project. Therefore, we were not able to gather additional data and feedback from users to refine our prototypes.
Mid-fidelity prototype of UCI Home Page
Mid-fidelity prototype of UCI Department Vision Page

What Was Redesigned?

Informatics Home Page

What?

Our team realized that there are more additional spaces on the home page of the informatics page that can include more relevant information about the department. Therefore, we included 7 additional sections with topics included in each section.

Why?

By providing more resources to the users on the home page, it will be easier for users to learn what type of information they can find on the website.

Department’s Vision Page

What?

We redesigned the “The Four Key Values” section of the webpage to include colored background and organized them into columns instead of simply listing them as it is on the original website.

Why?

Our team had the idea to make the webpage more visually appealing. Currently, the department’s vision page only includes plain text without any color or images to make it more visually appealing. We believe that our redesigns on the color and organization can grab the user’s attention on the most important section on the webpage.

B.S. Informatics Degree Page

What?

On the original B.S. Informatics Website, we believe that it only provided minimal information about the degree. Therefore, we included an extra section on the B.S. Informatics Degree Page that details the course requirements for the degree.

Why?

In our user interviews, we found that many students believe that when they are looking for course requirements for a specific degree, they had a hard time finding it. 

Reflections

Takeaways

1. Importance of user research
Conducting user research using semi-structured interviews is important to gain insights into the user's needs and requirements. It serves as a guideline for the implementation of our redesign ideas.
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2. Advantages of personas
Building personas allows one to look at the result of our user interviews in a more organized way. Personas also help our team to visualize potential users of our product and generate solutions for their frustrations and needs.

3. Challenge: Insufficient time
Due to the insufficient time for this project, our team was only able to develop mid-fidelity prototypes instead of an interactive high-fidelity prototype. Similarly, we were not able to conduct prototype testing to gather feedback.

Next Steps

1. Construct high-fidelity interactive prototypes

2. Conduct user-testing

3. Additional redesigns to improve the overall experience

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