Writing Studies Website

of the University of Washington Tacoma (UWT)

This is a group project in my Design Studio class, assigned by the Writing Studies faculty, where we completely redesigned the website using the existing content as a foundation.

My role: Co-led interaction and visual design. Involved in conducting user research, and usability studies.

The team: 2 interaction designers, 1 writer, 1 asset collector, 1 project manager. All involved in user research, testing, and writing.

Tool: Figma, Canva, Slack

Writing Studies is one of the majors in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences of UWT.

Problem: Through user research, we discovered the website is outdated, text-heavy, and couldn't deliver the value of the humanities majors to potential students. It causes the recruitment rate to drop and causes frustration in current major students when using the site.

Solution: Redesign the website to provide engaging, informative but digestible content, and create a welcoming and inclusive feeling to enhance students interested in enrolling in the Writing Studies major, so they feel a sense of belonging and have access to information about the major and know what to do with it.

Process: we conducted user research to understand who are we designing for.

Target users:

Current Writing Studies students
Students in the Technical Communication minor
Non-WS major/Pre-major students
WS faculty
WS alumni

Research Methods:

Stakeholder interview
User Interviews
Contextual Interviews
Survey
Competitive Analysis

We found 5 key insights based on everything we gathered :

What can you do with a WS degree?: Students want to know what to do with their Writing Studies degree.
Finding Connections: Students want to find opportunities to connect outside of the classroom.
Involvement in WS: Faculty want to show what is happening within the Writing Studies major.
Visual Engagement: Students want more appealing content and visual features.
Organization, Structure, & Labels: Information architecture is confusing and could lead students to take the wrong classes.

With our findings from research, we came up with a UX goal under a How Might We statement question:

"How might we engage students interested in or enrolled in the Writing Studies major so they feel a sense of belonging and have access to information about the major and know what to do with it?"

Having a clear statement helped us come up with the user storyboard, and based on that, we were able to map out the site's navigation bar and potential pages/ content for each category.

Alumni 2nd ver

Screen-Shot-2023-04-29-at-4.57.17-PM-1-844x2048.png

Result

We successfully delivered the final prototype to our stakeholders. They and other students were impressed with the design and expressed excitement about the potential of the product. While we feel proud of the work we’ve done, we also recognize that there is always room for improvement. While our team won’t be responsible for the product’s continued iteration, we’re confident that future teams will be able to build upon our progress and deliver a successful implementation. Ultimately, we believe that a commitment to ongoing improvement will help the product reach its full potential and achieve its intended goals.

Update: I'm proud to say that the current Writing Studies website was revised based on our prototype.

Read Our Process Book Presentation

Check Out The Interactive Prototype

Memories

This was us - the professor, my team, and I - after delivering the prototype to the Stakeholders.

Our project was nominated by the Institue for Innovation and Global Engagement (IIGE) Research Paper & Project Award.