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How can we better meet the needs of the University and its users?
The first stage for our website redesign is to understand business and user needs, this exploration comprises the discovery phase of the project.
The discovery phase helps us to understand what we are trying to achieve by a redesign.
Needfinding is fundamental process that builds the foundations for our future website – the University site must serve a clear purpose.
To kick off discovery, we’ve broken the phase into business needs, analytics, user needs and design inspiration:
Business needs
For business needs we’re looking at key high-level strategic documents for the University, interviewing stakeholders and performing a competitor analysis.
We’ve already began summarising key documents and focusing on high level aspects that the University site exists to help support. The key documents are the Institutional Plan, Brand Guidelines and a research document by consultants Uffindel West (which led to our current brand).
Stakeholder interviews will be organised with a sample of stakeholders to understand the different priorities that are needed from the website.
We’ll also be undertaking a competitor analysis to understand what other universities are doing and to be inspired.
User needs
We’ll be working with other teams to gather user testing feedback. Surveys will help us understand how people user our site and discover what their pain points and potential solutions are.
Analytics
Analytics help us to understand where are users are coming from. How they move through our site? Where do they leave our site? Popular pages, heat-maps and search terms all help to give us clearer information about what people are doing on our site.
Inspiration boards
Supporting this will also be the competitor analysis. What do we like about other sites? What are other Universities doing here and abroad? What is our competitive edge?
All these questions help inspire us, giving direction to our design principles and guiding our visual language.
Personas
Personas are models of user groups represented as a single archetype character. These are based on data and research and help developers, designers and editors focus on creating content that meets their intended audience’s needs.
Personas help summarise the needs and scenarios and help you to keep the user at the forefront as you design or create content.
We’ll also create story boards to illustrate the context of our users. It is important that we understand the full service – user experience is wider than only the website and needs to resonate as a unified service across all customer touchpoints – print, email, phone, online…
We developed five personas last year and will be refining and renewing these versions, as well as additions for other user groups, based on our discovery phase research.