Josephinum Redesign

Created: Spring 2019

The following project was completed as part of an Advanced Usability Research course I took during the second semester of my senior year at Miami University.  For the duration of the semester, I was part of a five person team that was tasked with conducting usability research to improve the usability of a client’s website.  That client was Josephinum Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic school in Chicago.

Research

The first step of the redesign was to get a better understanding of what problems existed with the current site.  We first held a meeting with the client to get a better sense of what they were hoping to see from the redesign.  We also conducted a heuristic analysis of the current website in order to identify what problems existed with the site, and what areas we needed to focus on in the redesign.  

Our heuristic analysis identified that one of the main problems with the current website was the organization of pages and navigation.  We then conducted a card sort in order find out how people would naturally organize the type of content on the website.  Other research we conducted sought to understand who the users to our site would be, what their hopes would be, and what struggles they might have.  In order to understand the mindset of parents looking at Josephinum as a potential school for their children, we conducted in depth interviews with parents in Chicago who had children going through the process of selecting schools.  Some of the quotes that we found insightful from these interviews included "I like data, I like numbers" and "Culture is more important than the resume of the faculty".

Storyboard

Once we had collected the initial research, we were able to begin making some decisions for the redesign of the site.  The first step was to storyboard different ideas for layout for the site and elements to include that would solve the problems that we had identified.  These initial sketches focused primarily on the personas that we had created, and on helping address their wants and the story we had given them.

Final Design

One of the interesting insights we found, was in regard to the call to action buttons for Giving (donations) and Applying that we had in our navigation bar.  Most users did not seem to register those buttons existed, let alone use them to accomplish tasks.  This caused us to reconsider their design, and even if they were needed.  Ultimately, we decided to keep them, but changed their color and size to make them more noticeable.  A second round of user testing showed a slight increase in use, indicating the redesign was effective.

The last step in our process was to present our findings and final design to the client.

An interactive prototype of the final design can be found at the following link: Josephinum Prototype