Overview
At the Learning Technology Service (LTS) at York University, I worked together with another designer to create a new online tool to demonstrate the department’s capabilities to faculty and staff. The project involved our team exploring user-centred design methods to understand what the potential clients, shareholders, and support staff, would need/want from their online service.
The Team
1x Department manager
1x Assistant manager
Me
Another designer
My Role
Usability and Prototyping
Pictured above was the state of their website at the beginning of the project.
When joining the LTS at York University, the managers of the department tasked myself and the other designer to take on a self-driven project of overhauling their online presence. They knew that they wanted change and they looked to us to deliver it..It was up to us to understand the problem, determine the scope, and then seek out a solution.
We had to ask ourselves, how might we build a tool that allows educators to understand their potential for their classrooms? To understand the challenges, we conducted a usability audit and landed on 4 key areas for improvement:
- Interaction Consistency
- Stronger Call-to-actions
- Information on the Department
- Standards for Communication
Here are the results of our card sorting exercise.
From our conversations with staff in the department, it seemed like many inside and outside of the team were unaware of the scope of their services. To get a better view on what they had to offer, we polled our managers for what we currently offer, and what they’d like to offer. With this information, we constructed an open card sorting exercise to organize these services. Organizing the services led to our creation of the system map, which in turn informed our plans for our wireframe development.
The platform homepage
With all of our research collected we moved to creative visual assets for the team to use during and after our project's development. We created a design system and style guide for the department to unify their visual consistency in their outgoing communications after our term was over, and used it to design their new website, combining the existing York University brand guidelines with our own. After much internal review and testing, we delivered to our managers a high fidelity working prototype through WordPress.
The full home page screen.
Our learning solutions page.
A "product page" of one of our learning solutions.
Our media services page.
Our page showing where faculty and staff could find inspiration for their classrooms.
Recognizing an employee, pt. 2