Residence Life

At my current position, the Residence Life section of our website needed to be redesigned. There were limited photos, no videos, and straight-forward text that didn't tell the story of living on campus. I led the redesign of this section so that it now sells the value of living on a college campus.

Date: Spring 2019     Skills: UX Design, UI Design, Content Strategy

With more college students opting to commute due to finances, it is imperative to show the real value of the traditional college experience. My team members and I met with the Director of Residence Life to understand her vision and needs for the site. She made us aware of the need for exploring multiple visual components, describing the various amenities on campus, and hearing testimonials from current students.

I gathered everyone who would be involved with creating the content for the site; videographers, writers, content strategists, web developers, and designers. Before we started creating anything, I wanted us to sit and think about everything someone may need/want if they lived on a college campus. I created a persona to help everyone envision a prospective student.

Each person took a few minutes and wrote ideas on sticky notes. When everyone was done, we reviewed the sticky notes and gathered them into groups based on topics. This allowed us to discover commonalities amongst our ideas as well as concepts that we may have not thought of without story mapping.

Next, I created low-fidelity wireframes. The wireframes helped the content writers, photographers, and videographers understand the flow of the website, necessary content creation, and content correlation.

After my team figured out how much content we needed to create, I got to work building an interactive prototype. This prototype was then shown to our stakeholders -allowing them to envision how a prospective student would interact with the website. After we got the stakeholders approval, I shared my designs with the Senior Web Developer who later built the website.  

When we made the newly designed section live, we were able to capture a cleaner, more vivid picture of campus life. Prospective students can watch videos to learn about student life, see campus amenities such as the new fitness center and access to the greenway, and  compare the differences between the residence halls. 

Landing Page - Before

Landing Page - After