How Students and Faculty Become Confident In Their School’s Website

Situation

I was first introduced to Steven Dow, Associate Professor at UCSD, by Don Norman via email.

Steven brought to my attention that they had recently spend thousands of dollars on a website redesign just 6 months prior, but the launch was underwhelming.

Task

I was tasked with leading a group of designers and developers. Aligning stakeholders with end-users, and delivering a visual design that was compelling and engaging.

Action

The first step I took was to articulate everything that was verbally discussed over the phone and email in a kickoff presentation. This way I could restate the pain and reason for my being there.

Next I conducted a work session where we reviewed the brand attributes through the lens of the CORE Framework.  We also reviewed the user personas and made corrections.  Finally we sent out a Google Forms survey to understand and get stakeholder buy in. This is because the stakeholders were very difficult to get into the same room at the same time.

With Stakeholder approval, we finally understood which visual direction to go in, and what was the most important goal or initiative for them. The most important goal was to get visiting faculty from other design schools to speak at their Design@Large speaking series.

Result

The result was an engaging visual design masterpiece built on the back of WordPress. The user interface had dynamic node animation using particles.js, and it put the Design Lab’s content front and center.

Lessons Learned

If I had to do it all over again, I would have perhaps prescribed the Design Sprint methodology as oppose to CORE. It would have been nice to have conducted Guerrilla Research.

Being at the Design Lab’s weekly meeting, would have also been a great time to show face and elicit buy-in on the survey or visual designs.

Students definitely move at a different speed than professionals, even if it’s fun to teach them.

Bureaucracy definitely requires a certain amount of persistence and patience when it comes to collaborating and getting alignment amongst various departments.