UTDesign Capstone
UTDesign Capstone is one of the top ranked capstone programs in the nation having students from our university winning national awards and beating out other top ranked schools. I helped in solving their problem of having poor website usability and brand identity
Role
Associate Designer
Timeline
Aug 2023 - Feb 2024
Team
Designer, Developer, Manager
Tools/Skills
Figma, Campus Press
Background
UTDesign Capstone is the program at the Unviersity of Texas at Dallas where senior engineering and computer science students complete a project under either for a company such as Texas Instruments, Raytheon, and more. Or the alternative if not availbe for the University. The program itself was strong with our students winning many awards in competions however we wanted to expand our market and gain more company lead projects for our students to complete to give them real world experience during their time in college.
Mockup Design for UTDesign Wensite
The ask
One of the reasons I was hired for the position was because of my background in User Experience. My manager tasked me with reviewing the website to identify points of improvement and any existing issues.
To accomplish this, I conducted a heuristic evaluation to find usability and accessibility issues, reviewed survey data to gather insights from our sponsors, and performed a competitive analysis to explore design trends and sources of inspiration.
Research Artifact
From my research I found that
Lack of brand claritiy through fonts, typogrpahy, and color
Usability issues such as having key links behind pages
Had too many options with no clear call to action
Planning phase
To scope the project and develop it we met with the Univiersity Web Development team to find any issues and constriants that we would have to consider while contintuing with the work. We found that we had certain constraints in the software that they were using in campus press with the format of the header's and footer's.
However the project was pheasable and they were willing to develop the work after sending over material for us to review such as the anayltics and branding material
Style Guide
Now that the project was we ran a workshop with the department to find the core pages of the website that would still be needed. Reviewing the anayaltics they sent over.
At the end of the workshop we came away with the idea to split the website into two one that was business facing and the other for students for them to access campus resources and room bookings.
New branding
Previous Landing Page for Computer Science
Based off the requirents from development I recreated the footer and header that was needed in figma and included brand guidelines from the University into the project. This helped address accessibility from color contrast and made our website fit our approvde guidelines from the University.
Key links in the front of the page
One of the issues that I found while doing an anylsis of the page was that one of the key links the 'project proposal ' was hidden behind the companies page and the user had to scroll to the bottom of the page. Moving the link to the front of the website improves the user's access to the link at any point in their journey
Submit Project Form
Reflections
UTDesign Capstone etablished a relationship with the Web Services team at UT Dallas
Now follows accessibility guidelines that was previously missing, and has a established page for businesses interested in getting involved with the program
Next Project
