Baskin School of Engineering  🖥Â
Human-Centered Design Research Project
OVERVIEW
Research and redesign for UC Santa Cruz's engineering school website.
ROLES
User Experience Researcher
User Experience Designer
TIMELINE
January 2020 - March 2020
TEAM
Somya Bhatia
Daniel Jarreau Ortega
Hunter Lynch
Thelonious Aull
CONTEXT
About the Project
During my time in college, I was able to take a Human-Centered Design Research class as an elective for my Computer Science degree. This class altered my career as I left confirming that I wanted to pursue UX Design (and not Engineering) after graduating. This specific project was completed over the course of 3 months with my team. Our goal was to study the efficiency and ease of the website through research and data.
GETTING STARTED
How are students currently using this website?
The undergraduate website is used by Engineering students at UC Santa Cruz to locate class information, major/minor degree requirements, advising information, and information about the Engineering department at UCSC as a whole.
The problem? The current site makes it almost impossible to do any of that.​​​​​​​
The problem? The current site makes it almost impossible to do any of that.​​​​​​​
Current Baskin Engineering Undergraduate Affairs website
RESEARCH
User Interviews
My team knew this website had issues but we had no idea how bad it was until we conducted user research and studied how students were using this website. We did this by finding individual, user specific information through interviews.
The user interview pool consisted of 16 undergraduates in various majors within UC Santa Cruz's Baskin School of Engineering, and 3 students outside. This was the interview and observation guide we used to conduct the interviews:
Key Findings
From the 16 interviews we were able to get valuable information about how current students were using the site and what pain points they were experiencing.Â
From these findings, we identified the severity of each UX issue and picked the top 3 to provide design recommendations for and focus on.
USER STORIES
How will different students utilize the site?
Since the BSOE website is meant for multiple types of students, I decided to create user stories so we could revisit them during the design process.
1. As an undergraduate student looking to transfer into a BSOE major, I want the information for the major requirements to be accessible on the front page so that I can find this information smoothly and make a plan
2. As a current high school student and prospective UC Santa Cruz student, I want to know what the BSOE is and what opportunities I can gain from it so I can envision my future at the school and view majors that interest me
3. As a passionate member of the BSOE community, I want information about how to become a Peer Advisor so that I can help provide help to undergraduate students who may have questions about majors, referrals, and resource information
4. As a student, I should be able to locate information about my major/minor so that I can select the correct courses towards graduation
5. As a student, I should be able to locate advising information so that I can make appointments with my advisor
6. As an undergraduate student, I should be able to easily locate information about the Engineering Department at UCSC so that I can see what it has to offer.
Organizing the Information
In order to visualize the site, we created an Information Architecture diagram which would help us organize and structure the content before wireframing.
LOFI SKETCHES
I created one set of lofi sketches for navigating to major information, navigating to advising, and navigating to classes
Quantitative Research
This was Prototype A and these were the results from asking 4 students to complete the same tasks as the earlier interviews:
- 2 out of 4 participants got to major information in 2 clicks
- 2 out of 4 participants got to major information in 1 click
- 3 out of 4 participants got to advising information in 1 click
- 1 out of 4 participants got to advising information in 2 clicks
- 3 out of 4 participants got to class information in 4Â clicks
- 1 out of 4 participants got to class information in 1 click
HIGH FIDELITY DESIGNS
This is the original BSOE website with the stated 3 UX design problems
PROPOSED WEBSITE
After a few iterations, my team and I came up with this simple and organized redesign. It addresses and fixes all 3 UX problems while eliminating broken or misleading features.
