Oregon State University

This was my first UX project at my first UX job! I ran the UX on project almost completely alone.

I felt very accomplished to see this one go live!

Overview

The Problem:

Oregon State University wanted a new website that brought their aulmni information and giving information together in one place. They decided to roll their existing Alumni and Foundation websites together into one website. 

The Solution:

There is a lot of content between the two existing websites, so information needs to be arranged in such a way that it's easy to find for all users.

This includes persona groups, including the interrnal users who work for OSU.

My Role:

I acted as UX lead for this project and collaborated with the content and developer teams to create all project deliverables.

Research

Primary Research:

Several discovery sessions were conducted across 6 business units within OSU. I needed to talk to as many groups as possible to get insights across multiple business units to uncover as many user types as possible. I looked for pain points and goals for each business unit.

The 6 different business units I spoke to are:

• Alumni Engagement
• Annual Giving
  
• Athletics
• Development
• Finance
• Marketing & Communications
  

Analysis

User Flow:

Upon completing discovery, I had a LOT of notes. I had a lot of information on the personas I wanted to create and the user flows that would guide the structure of the new combined site.

User flows were not a deliverable of this project, but I did find the highest goals of the new site and I was even able to gather some insights from analytics of the existing sites.

Information Architecture:

I used figma to create an official Information Architecture document that encompassed all pages (new and existing) for the updated site.

Site Map:

As a deliverable, I created a site map for the new site. There were a lot of pages that they wanted to get rid of as well as quite a few pages that were to be combined together.

I did a sort of card sorting excercise with a coworker and after a few bits of feedback from the client, we all agreed on the new site map.

Personas:

I was actually able to work on the persona document alongside the site map because I had all of the information I needed from the discovery sessions. 

I created two overarching personas that could be further broken down into many other persona types. Here is the outline of the personas that I created for the new site.

• Overarching Personas
  • Carrie Consumer
  • Peter Participant
    
• Internal Users
  
  • Fran Foundation
  • Frank Faculty
    
• External Users
  • Victor Volunteer
  • Abby Alumni
  • Bobby Beaver
  • Henry Harris
  • Emily Engaged
  • Jessie Job-Seeker

Ideation/Design

Wireframes

The first step of wireframes was to define all of the template pages to flesh out. I knew i would be designing for mobile, tablet, and desktop.

• Homepage
• Media Gallery
• Media Gallery - Detail View
• Stories Landing Page
• Article (Story Detail)
• Search Results
• Staff Directory
• Widget Library

I was designing for a new-to-me platform called Sitefinity. I was able to reference other past projects done by my team to quickly see all of the capabilites it has. I was backed by a great developer team, so designing for this project was easy. We were able to implement tagging to help sort content and make the site a lot easier to navigate for its users.

This was my first time making a widget library, but it became something that was useful on all of my other wireframing projects moving foward.

Visual Design

Style

The agency had another designer assigned to take on the visual part of this project, and I think they did excellent work applying the existing branding and giving the site a lot more life! I do wish I had some "before" screenshots of these sites. 

See Visual Comps in PDF format:

Conclusion

Lessons Learned:

Since this was my first real life UX project outside of Springboard, I really felt like I hit the ground running and had to quickly adapt. Here are the biggest takeaways I got from this project:

• Even though a project could benefit a lot from a certain deliverable, you often have to make do to stay within a client's budget.
• Sometimes an unknown and uninvolved stakeholder can swoop in and have a lot of uncertainty and needs to be reassured that the project is on the right path.
• Don't forget to take "before" screen shots of a project--these can also be used in figjam to make notes for potential updates.
• Have all of your decisions backed up with UX principles and data and you will have all the confidence you need and the client will have confidence in you too!