UChicago Website Design

UChicago Website Design

University of Chicago Web Design

Collaboration with University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to revamp their website design and improve usability.

At a Glance

Task

Evaluate usability of current web experience and redesign 3 core screens of UChicago Polsky website.

My Role

UX Designer and Researcher

Key Deliverables

3 core screens and interactive prototype.

Context

The UChicago Polsky Center is a professional development hub that supports entrepreneurial technology projects by partnering with investors, project partners, and project creators. The Polsky Center website plays a major role in outreach and communication of these technologies with industry professionals. Overall goal is to form a partnership with collaborators, fund their research and product inventions, and eventually have companies license patents to their intellectual property all through the process of technology transfer.

Problem Breakdown

The main issues faced by the Polsky Center for their website redesign were determining how to facilitate website navigation and how to improve the discoverability of key elements within the site. Implementing UX principles was necessary in making this process as streamlined as possible to increase site traffic, understanding, and usability for staff and industry partners.

Research

  • Competitive Analysis

    Evaluation of similar university organizations and innovation centers.

  • Heuristic Evalutation

    Usability audit of current website experience.

  • Usability Testing + User Interviews

    Gathered feedback from technology scouters and industry professionals on current web experience.

Research Takeaways

  • Users have difficulty parsing content (text heavy)

  • Home page lacking value

  • Users typically don't "browse" tech publishers

  • Grid layouts are a good way to balance content

  • Most tech publisher websites direct user immediately to search

UX Requirements

Based on client requirements and research, I compiled a list of UX requirements to follow throughout the design process. Some of the highest priority items are listed.

Personas

Interviews helped determine who the Polsky Center’s main users are. Based on this information, I developed personas for two key stakeholders:

  • Technology scouter

  • Commercialization manager

Understanding their processes drove design decisions moving forward.

Site Wide:

  • Allow users to get to tech publisher page more easily from Polsky website

Home Page:

  • Create a landing page that aligns with user expectations due to user confusion between home and technology pages

Search Page:

  • Improve technology summaries due to lack of consistency and scannability

Technology Page:

  • Prioritize technology detail information to help users more efficiently identify a technology and its status

Design

Validation Testing

Began validation testing after developing first draft of a high fidelity prototype. Goals for testing were to determine if redesign had

  • Successfully optimized the technology search process

  • Eased the ability to parse information

  • Oriented users with the Polsky Center and the technology transfer process.

Same pool of users was used from initial round of usability testing, which included industry professionals like tech scouters and commercialization managers, referred by the client.

This round of user testing was absolutely essential to the development of our final design, as we received plenty of constructive feedback that influenced some major changes.

FINAL PROTOTYPE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - experiencing display issues!

Interactive prototype - begin by clicking “Available Technologies”

Wireframes

  • Search Technologies - users automatically oriented here to optimize search process; this is where users access individual tech detail pages

  • Explore More - developed to implement marketing content for the center and give user an overview of technologies organized by category

  • Contact - gives users contact information for key people at Polsky, as well as engagement opportunities and newsletter sign up

  • Troubleshooting/Resources - provides FAQ information and resources regarding the technology transfer process

Finalized technology details page.

Final Prototype

Key Changes:

  • Home - Users expressed a desire to still have a landing page. Therefore, we changed our "Explore More" page to "Home", including marketing content as well as a direct-to-search bar for a streamlined user journey.

  • Search - The search page remained the same, except for some minor design tweaks and being moved to the second touch point on the site nav bar.

  • Contact - We reformatted this page to place more emphasis on engagement opportunities and less on the newsletter, as users believed partnering opportunities to have more value.