Role: Lead UX & UI Designer

Building a student-focused digital experience.


The Goal

Ithaca College (IC) is one of the top 10 universities in the northeast. Its mission is to educate, engage, and empower through theory, practice, and performance. The project goal was to replace legacy website platforms to provide modern web capabilities, deliver an exceptional user experience that improved the student journey, and place our primary audiences’ needs, preferences, and behaviors at the very center of our design, content, and information.​  

The Challenge

This was the biggest change to the design, content, tech, and structure in over a decade. The challenge was to create a solution that accurately reflects the IC's distinctness while rolling out in a phased release structure which allowed us to release key sections of the site in stages. Our approach was modular, creating a suite of building blocks to construct pages. We achieved this by implementing an Agile Scrum methodology to the project, including all scrum events (sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective) which helped us to organize our work more efficiently, set clear expectations and timelines.

Setting up the groundwork with a data-informed approach

01. Empathize

02. Define

03. Ideate & Explore

Deliverables

• Competitive Analysis
• User Interviews 
• Content Audit
• UX / UI Audit

01. Empathize

We reviewed existing materials and conducted stakeholder interviews to establish a view of current product performance, pain points, and standing within our competitive set. We then looked to transform the experience by investigating the students' complete journey and streamlining their digital path.

Content & UX Audit

Prospective Student Persona

Card Sorting & Tree Testing

After developing a working IA structure based on findings card sorting sessions, we tree tested a group of 60 participants to ensure information was structured in a way that made sense to our users. This helped to kick off the site and content mapping process.

key Findings:

• Respondents strongly agreed on the content for the enrollment-centric categories: Academics, Admissions, and Life at IC. 
  
• Testing showed that prospective students knew to visit “Life at IC” for general information on the campus experience.
  

Deliverables

• Brand Exploration
• User Flows
• Wireframes
• Prototypes
  
• Modular Pattern Library
• Design System

03. Ideate & Explore

Based on research learnings and data, I concepted through progressive stages of fidelity from sketches to wireframes and interactive prototypes and worked with engineers to test and rapidly refine and iterate prototypes. I also documented visual and content guidelines to empower content managers and ensure a consistent experience for all users.

Design exploration

I created a mood board in Mural to get the gears to turn and promote creativity and innovation. 

Wireframing

Content strategists provided content recommendations documents that helped speed up the wireframe process to ensure the vision is achieved and the integrity of the page remains intact. We presented wireframes to campus partners allowing them to provided real-time feedback via the Invision collaboration tool.

Final Responsive Designs

The design is minimal and simple, with large images and clean typography, designed to create a more immersive experience. The new site opens up the width of the canvas, creating new breakpoints to ensure the site displays well on both large screens and smaller devices. White space plays an important role in keeping the experience clean and focused - light and airy to frame content and gives visuals space to breathe. The color palette is fresh and vibrant, and the use of bold imagery and video capture Ithaca’s beautiful campus.

LAUNCH THE SITE

Deliverables

• Usability Testing
• Design Iteration
• Measurement Framework
  
• Optimization Process
  

Iterated on prototype & track findings to inform the final designs. Worked closely with data to outlined the site objectives, goals, and KPIs to establish the process by which we will measure and optimize site performance moving forward.

Awards