Project Type
UX Design
Rol
UX Designer
Deliverables
Web Design, Digital Strategy, Content Strategy
Problem Statement
The College of Education’s is revolutionizing the education industry with programs that lead to careers in education beyond teaching positions. Evolving Web partnered with The University of Washington for a consultation on content strategy and the redesign of the College of Education’s website.
Team composition
Senior UX Designer, Content Strategist, UI Designer and Project Manager.
The vision
Bring a user-centered mindset to take the UW CoE from an institution for earning a degree to a digital experience that celebrates the life opportunities unlocked by pursuing an education studies and the diverse background of its students.
It's no secret that a redesign can be useful for diverse business goals. Increasing brand recognition, updating visual elements, and improving the navigation are some of the most common ones. But in the case of the College of Education, it was an opportunity to better serve its diverse users.
Accessibility, responsiveness, and showcasing the college's offerings were our guiding principles.
A call to diversity
Visibility builds trust, by highlighting the institution's diversity and active community actions (fostering over 300 partnerships with schools, non-profits and communities) and by raising awareness of the significant percentage of the student population who identify as people of color or international (over 50%), it helps build credibility and inclusion while encouraging prospective students to apply to join the UW CoE.
The College of Education’s primary goal was to communicate their mission of transforming inequitable systems of education and to build awareness around the variety of their programs available.
The process (in a nutshell)
Understand the pain-points and friction points for the business and users through an extensive discovery process (including stakeholder interviews, questionnaires, user journey workshops, benchmarking, and drafting wireframes).
Translate those insights into design opportunities centered around the idea of addressing business goals and supporting the prospective students' journey.
Running alignment workshop with stakeholders to ensure the redesign is building awareness around the institution's value proposition.
Identified search functionality as the primary user pain point through research and user feedback; centered the entire redesign around reconfiguring the search experience and content infrastructure.
You can't search for what you don't know
Impact
Much of our work focused around the search experience, ultimately this was the entry point for the majority of users and was as well the exit point as they couldn't see clearly what they could get by joining the University of Washington.
The changes we made allowed students to make an informed choice, find the most suitable program for their career goals and increase engagement with content like upcoming events, enrolment dates, and important announcements.
1
Plug-and-go compatible Drupal-based website
3
Major patterns designed in 3 months
+32
Page templates designed
Reflections and learnings
What if pursuing a career in education meant easily accessing the required information to make an informed decision?
As a designer, this project represented a formative experience in managing relationships with complex stakeholders. It was my first experience getting involved with a higher education environment, and it certainly sharpened my skills in user research synthesis, iterative testing, and designing focused in accessibility.
In the end, we discovered that the value proposition of the UW CoE already existed (active participation in the community, information required for prospective students, and so on). We only needed to show the internal team how to make this information more accessible and provide them with a clear north star to follow for future content development.