Creating a Website for the Center for Research in SEAD Education
With excerpts from the final report, co-authored by Paco Gallegos, Tianyu Ge, Victoria Hairston, Danna Kim, and Eunjee Kim.
The Center for Research and SEAD Education (“SEAD” stands for “Science, Engineering, Art, and Design”) is a unit within the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) of Virginia Tech that dedicates to broadening awareness of, encouraging participation in, and extending education and research opportunities of SEAD and STEM based initiatives to PK12 students. FourDesign is a faculty-led, student-run design studio in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. The Center commissioned FourDesign to create a new website to replace the existing one, which has not been updated since 2015. We worked with the FourDesign team as well as our client in a semester-long project to design and implement the website.
Design Iterations
Left: The initial wireframe for the home page, built with Balsamiq. Middle: I created the first high fidelity mockup for the home page, built with Sketch. The original structure in the wireframe remained the same. Right: The first attempt on building the website for the Center, which was fully static. The original structure in the wireframe remained the same.
Wireframes quickly gave our team, FourDesign and our clients an early idea on how the website should look like. We provided our opinions and consultations for our client after some discussions and swiftly moved away from a fully static architecture.
User Evaluations
Prior to user evaluation, notice the navigation bar contains "mission statement" instead of the target audience (visit crse.centers.vt.edu for latest version).
The results from the evaluation were reviewed by the team before presenting the feedback to the design team and client.
Our most major and consistent feedback was that navigating the website is not intuitive. Specifically, the navigation bar headings for the website subpages are not descriptive or meaningful. The Center wanted to emphasize three words in their mission statement: inspire, impact, and connect. These words were used as headings for the navigation bar. Inspire was meant to display information for parents and educators, impact for researchers, and connect with students and faculty. However, the users made it clear that they were more confused than inspired by this format. One user described it as “using buzzwords”, and another suggested that it may be better to divide the pages into self-explanatory terms, such as “students”, “faculty”, and “researchers”. Most of the users took multiple attempts or navigated through the entire website before coming up with an answer to our task questions.
Despite the tight timeframe, the website was completed before the end of the semester. I tendered documentations to the Center's sysadmin and offered voluntary support after graduation to ensure the successful deployment to the production server. You can see the website live at crse.centers.vt.edu.
