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Center for Entrepreneurship
Improving information architecture and usability
Client
Center for Entrepreneurship
Role
UX/UI Designer
UX Researcher
Project Manager
Time
9 months
Delivery
Final design + functionality
Research findings + data
Documentation
About
This project is a final capstone for the University of Michigan’s School of Information. I, along with three other students, worked with the Center for Entrepreneurship to help tackle problems the organization faced in designing a website for their various user types. The organization wanted to improve usability and information architecture of the webite to make its programs and resources easiliy discoverable. In order to implement any design changes, the organization needed data-backed results.
Surveys
To gather feedback from existing users about website use, struggles, and successes, we set up an online survey. The survey consisted of ten questions and yielded 1,803 responses.
Results:
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We received feedback from all three user groups (students, faculty, and partners)
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Most users are "Almost Always" able to find what they are looking for
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Most users find the website "Fairly easy to navigate"
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Most users do not discover new resources organically on the website
Personas
From research results, personas were developed to show user groups and served as a reference point for goals, motivations, and pain points.
Card Sorting
Many repeating headings and subheadings were found during the heuristic analysis, potentially causing confusion to users. Due to this, an open card sorting format was used to see how participants think the site should be organized and what categories they expect to see. Card sorting gives a better understanding of what forms of information architecture are most intuitive to users.
Results:
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Users expect to see the headings Opportunities/Events, Student Resources, External Partners, and About Us.
We propose simplifying the categories found on the website by reducing the amount of duplicated subheadings and using titles suggested by card sorting participants.
Design Process
Sketches
The design process began with sketches to iterate through many ideas quickly, providing options for presenting the information. From the sketches, it became clear that organizing the categories with drop-down menus would be the most intuitive for users.
Wireframes
After the sketches were narrowed down they were turned into wireframes, making it easier to see the layout and make adjustments. The design was made for desktop since that is how most of their users access the site. Wireframes were made using Figma.
Prototypes
The prototypes are similar to the wireframes but bring the design closer to how it would look on the finished site. Prototypes were user tested.
Changes Made:
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Included a "Get Involved" tab in the header instead of having it as a section for each user group (students, faculty/researchers, and partners). This feature also promotes involvement with the Center.
Testing Results:
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Users understood that the boxes were clickable in this iteration and wanted the dropdowns to appear when hovering over the navigation tab.
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Users could return to the landing page by clicking the CFE logo in the top left easily and did not struggle with other navigation features.
Final Design
Home Screen:
The original design had an image as the home page with the information below. Many users found this confusing and were unaware that the home page had content besides a picture. The home page was updated to welcome users to the website and signal to the user that there is information on the page.
Drop-Down Menu:
During testing, users became frustrated because they did not know what information each tab contained. Dropdown menus were added to reduce this confusion.
Get Involved Page:
Users could not tell who could get involved in each of the resources offered by the Center for Entrepreneurship. This made finding resources difficult. We created a Get Involved page that includes a filter function to allow users to find the appropriate resources.
Validation
A/B tests were conducted with the newly designed website and the original website (to minimize differences in look and functionality, the original CFE site was replicated in Figma). The tasks for each group were identical. The number of clicks and time spent to complete each task were recorded. After each task, the users rated the difficulty of the task on a scale of 1-10 to gauge their perception of the usability.
Results:
Original Website:
Newly Designed Website:
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