dixie.edu User Portals
Design & Development
Fall 2017
Like most university websites, the frontpage of Utah Tech University(formerly Dixie State)’s website was targeted towards prospective students. This leaves other user groups such as current students, faculty, staff and community members lost when trying to find content relevant to their needs. Redesigning our “portal” pages to be effective homepages or dashboards for each user group was a critical issue and top priority for our team that year.
- Role
- User Testing, User Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, Competitive Analysis, Visual Design, Web Design, Web Development
- Team
- Denise Nadal, David Hulet, Brad Snow, Rex Frisbey
- Org
- Utah Tech University
Research & Design
We began this process by conducting user research. We held focus groups and user interviews to assess user sentiment about the site and learn what they considered to be their pain points. We reviewed our analytics to understand what our users were looking for and how they were finding it.
After collecting a tremendous amount of raw data, I distilled it into common activities and goals for each group. After identifying the most important goals and needs for our users, we proceeded into the design phase and explored several different designs.
We produced prototypes of our strongest designs and tested them with users.
After testing with users we had a clear idea of what direction to go in, what was working and what needed to be improved. I proceeded with refining the visual design, and after a few more rounds of design and critique with our review committee we agreed on a final design.
The Results
The final result was a easily modified WordPress template that our Web Team could update regularly.
