Project Brief
Re-design Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering website directory staff pages: https://www.ae.gatech.edu/browser-directory
My Role
UX designer, Web developer
Team
Liyi Lin (UX Designer + Developer)
Kelsey Gulledge (Product Manager)
Monique Waddell (Product Manager)
Eric Sembrat (Web Developer)
Timeline
4 months
Tool
Figma, Drupal 9, Adobe Creative Suite
Main Design Challenge
Through user research, we noticed the problem of low usability, low accessibility, and inefficiency of reaching to the right person in our current directory pages, some of flows are confusing and hard to navigate, some information are separated.
Context
Our team is given task to redesign the directory pages of Gatech School of Aerospace Engineering, to better meeting the needs of students, prospective students, and staff to accurately reach the right people in Gatech School of Aerospace and ease their user flow.
“How might we increase the usability and efficiency with which users can connect with the right staff?”
How did we get there
Current situation and challenges
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitive Analysis
We looked through some competitive directory staff pages from other universities to find some inspirations, what we found out are
1. Using gird format to list directory staff could better straightforwardly providing audiences with overall views of people they might need to find.
2. Putting navigation filters on the top of the directory staff list could better match the user flow on the interface.
3. There are no solution available for for effectively connecting various stakeholders in schools with the appropriate individuals based on their diverse needs.
Usability Testing
User Story
Analyzing and Synthesizing Research Results
To identify any usability issues in the current version of the product, I collaborated with a fellow UX designer and conducted a Heuristic Evaluation.
Based on the finding, we prioritized the uncovered UX problems as Fix Now level and Need More Testing level, therefore the problems we focused the most would be the difficulties to reach to certain people in current website as well as the confusion of the user flow of contacting certain people.
Before getting into ideation and brainstorming, we would like to hear some first-hand information from users by conducting the first round usability testing with 3 tasks and 2 Likert scale, to see their behavior when they trying to reach someone on the school website, the goals is to
Goals
Determine the ease of using Directory pages by measuring the time of completing the tasks as well as the completion rate.
Identify the major usability issues and the pain points of using Directory pages based on the persona of defined in earlier stages.
We synthesized the collected data from the usability tests and competitive analysis into an affinity map to help us form insights and brainstorm design ideas to solve higher-order problems.
Key Insights: The filtering availability is missing, and the task flow is confusing
What we end up with…
Drawing from our present discoveries, we embarked on a series of explorations and iterations, refining features and user flows. We meticulously tailored solutions to address the specific use cases uncovered in our research, ultimately culminating in the completion of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) through collaborative efforts with our cross-functional team.
For each submenu, we customized the information layout above the sorting fields and person cards, to meet the expectation of users who tend to visit certain group of people at Georgia Tech AE
Refined Design
1️⃣ How might we helping stakeholders with different needs to reach to the right person with filter availability? 🔍
2️⃣ How might we ease the task for stakeholders to contact certain person 📇
Based on the current findings, we put different working groups, including academic faculty, research faculty, mentors, and post-doc fellows as the submenu under the main directory, the relationship are shown at the information architecture
I tried to incorporate a new flow within the landing page of the directory tab, where users can use the multi-filtering tool regarding to work group, research area, discipline, and name to reach to the right person ✅
I tried to make the contact information as apparent as possible by adding them right next to the photo of certain person at person page ✅
3️⃣ What else we can do to help stakeholders reach to the right person 😲
I tried to implement the work group as single pages of the all directory people as the sub menu of “directory” at the top menu bar in order to increase more path for people to reach to the right person ✅
Final Prototype
Go check launched prototype below ☺️
Usability test and future steps
Focus Group
We developed a clickable prototype to conduct focus group meeting to test the new website in order to have some in-depth understandings of how users will interact with the website, we did two focus group meetings with all types of users, including prospective students, current students, and staff in Georgia Tech School of AE.
First, we briefly introduced the product and then assign them some tasks from our testing plans we mapped out, users are able to think aloud and say whatever they want to say during the test, we observed their behaviors and wrote down what they have said, and finally asked them for some feedbacks for future plans. We received amounts of good feedbacks and some areas need to improve in the future. It really motivates us to implement our design by talking to the users, seeing their reaction when using our product, and building empathy with them.
Future Plans
Further developing the customization of users when they searching the person.
Designing the no results states to make implement the entire flows.
Improving the interface to implement the adaptability in mobile-ends.
Reflection
I am so proud that I got chance to work with such talented people and I am so happy that the website is finally launch, I’ve learnt how to work the product manager as well as engineers, the core of collaborating will always be communication, and I’ve also learnt how to get to users in all phases of product development, because for the weekly committee meeting, users such as staff or students will always involved so that we can keep having in-depth understanding of users and build empathy with them. If I have more time, I will implement the producr from different aspects and conducted more focus group to test the later versions of the website.