UNIVERSITY NEWS
Delivering the latest news updates to RIT students and faculty.
Overview
RIT’s University News is a news website made specifically for RIT students and faculty, bringing them the latest news and updates about their college and campus. However, problems with it's overall design prevent the site from reaching its full potential. The objective for this project was to re-skin the website in order to make for a more usable experience.
The Problem
At first glance, the current University News site has many glaring problems. After going through the website, several major problems presented themselves to me.
White Space - Elements are clustered together, with little attention paid to white space.
Hierarchy - The audience is easily confused on where to look first, and elements compete with each other for dominance of the composition.
Grouping - Information is mashed together, but little to no grouping is displayed.
The current University News website
The Solution
I wanted my design solution to touch heavily on the most problematic points of the original design. Ample yet effective whitespace and a solid hierarchy and grouping system would allow the user to easily scan the content of the site while not being overwhelmed. I planned to use several key features to achieve this:
Large Featured Story - Unlike the original design, I wanted my redesign to allow the user to remain focused upon coming to the home screen of the site, captivating them with a top story rather than bombarding them with a mass of different clusters of information.
Article and Event Cards - By confining article and event information into cards, my design would boast improved scanability and allow a more successful grouping of content.
Gridded Structure - By repeating a similar grid structure throughout the design, the user would becoming overwhelmed or thrown off due to an unordered or misaligned design.
INITIAL SKETCHES
FIRST DRAFT - B&W + COLOR
Stepping Back
After completing the first version of my reskin, I found myself frustrated with my overall design. Though clean, I felt that certain pieces of information still felt too clustered for my liking. Though some points of the design worked well, it was clear I needed to step back and iterate more in order to produce the best result.
And so I did just that, taking a moment to iterate through some of my least favorite parts of the design (mainly, the top story and the event cards).
Final Design
