Higher Ed Website Design
Client: University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
This website redesign was necessitated by a desire for an updated look paired with reliable functionality and accessibility. To achieve this goal, our team conducted thorough usability testing and adhered to WCAG Level AA for accessibility.
Usability
To ensure functionality of the site, we built wireframes in Sketch and conducted usability studies over Zoom with users from a pool of current students and faculty. We asked users to navigate to specific content and recorded the routes that they took and their thoughts on the process. We also asked for overall feedback on the layout of information and organization of the sitemap and menu. After testing, we analyzed all of the responses and were able to optimize sitemap and layouts to be more user-friendly.
UX
Our team worked through content strategy and user experience by laying out wireframes for all the page types on the site. This also gave us the opportunity to create standard components in Sketch (reusable patterns, modules, or tiles - these have various names!) that we could use across all the pages, ensuring consistency and efficiency in both design and programming.
Styles and accessibility
A part of any website design process, we laid out global styles including colors, fonts and headlines, active and hover states for links, menus, buttons, etc. It was especially important during this stage of design and development to keep accessibility at the forefront in terms of contrast ratios, font size minimums and consistency, tab order/navigation. We had the always-present rule to “never use color alone” meaning we always relied on a secondary indication of an action (like a link being underlined in addition to changing color).
Menu navigation
One big impetus for this website redesign was re-working the sitemap to improve organization and make the site more navigable for current and prospective students, alumni, and faculty. Our recommendation was a mega menu with very thoughtfully organized links and information.
Content
The final push involved laying out styles for all different types of content across the site, including: table and list styles for research projects, events, course catalog, course curricula, articles, directories, etc.
