University of Washington (UW) IT Connect, UW-IT’s campus-facing information portal for IT resources and services, provides information about technology at the University of Washington (UW): instructions, how-to documentation, and quick-start guides for teaching, learning, studying, research, planning and administration, and more. The current IT Connect has an information architecture that was developed almost a decade ago, and the information architecture and site design needs to be improved and updated in order to effectively connect the UW community to essential IT services and support.
The IT Connect User Experience Enhancements project sought to identify and address key user experience and usability issues with the site’s design, layout and information architecture by engaging the UW community in user research studies. These studies focused on the global elements of the site: the information architecture, header, footer, navigation menus and homepage. User research was iterative, with each study’s design being built upon the results from previous studies.
Role:
SR. UX Designer
Deliverables
Competitive Analysis, Survey, Card Sorting, Interviews, Focus Group, Tree Study, Interactive Prototype
Objectives
Redesign IT Connect to provide a better user experience for the UW community that will include:
- Clearly identifying the purpose of the site from a user perspective and ensuring the design supports that purpose.
- Understanding the user journey to help identify opportunities for improving IT Connect’s support of how a user navigates and uses the site.
- Providing information architecture and information design that is user-centered and task-based to create distinct, unambiguous top-level categories.
- Reducing visual clutter across the site, as determined by user research and user-focused content priorities.
- Addressing the confusing nature of the site navigation, including the sidebar menu.
Audience
Primary audience: End-User of the website
Secondary audience: Content Producers for the website
Interviews & Focus Group
We conducted five focus groups with end users, composed of 9 students, 3 faculty, and 5 staff. While the opinions gained from these focus groups help determine the direction for IT Connect, they come from a small sample of the UW community (21 of more than 70,000). Some of the discoveries were:
- Improve SEO and the external search experience
- Internal search should still be included on every page
- Internal search should be a text field in the upper right or middle
- Menus are a useful tool to explore the site, but only sometimes to find content
- Many users look for software on IT Connect
- Limit the number of choices in a navigation menu
- Help information on the homepage
- Confusion about help@uw.edu
- News should be on a page accessible through the navigation menu
- Common tasks should be on the homepage
Virtual Card Sorting & Virtual Tree Sorting
The virtual card sorting helped provided the direction for the website navigation and allows us to reach a wider audience because doing virtual card sorting was convenient and could be taking at anytime. The virtual tree sorting exercise helped us to verify our main content categories, and all their subcategories from our discovery in our virtual card sorting exercise. We are able to provide 2 options for for our users to see what best fit our navigation.
Prototype
Our prototype was design in Figma. Please see link for the live site.