The project was undertaken as a final project of the 'Media Specialist Practice' module at Kingston University in the MSc User Experience Design course.
As a postgraduate student of the Kingston University, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing (SEC), my first interaction with the University was through their main website. The SEC is one of the five faculties that function under the Kingston University and each of the faculties have their own design, their own information structure and their own ‘touch and feel’. However, all of them aim to convey the identity of the Kingston University.
SEC is a faculty with many diverse departments, such as science, engineering, maths, technology and computer science. It aims to increase the audience's science literacy, which means that students should be able to access the information provided on the department's websites simply and easily. I got to learn about the SEC’s website only a few months ago and before taking on this project I was informed by members of the faculty that the ‘’Research’’ section, particularly ‘’Digital information Research Centre’’ subpage requires looking into as it may not fulfil its intended purpose. This gave me the opportunity to explore, evaluate and collect findings for potential design recommendations of the aforementioned subpage.
Working with the students and a crucial member of the university, the unclear information architecture was identified which led to card sorting exercises that ultimately resulted in a re-structured webpage tailored specifically to the needs of the organization and its students.
Findings only applied to the ‘’Digital information Research Centre’’ page, making the redesign limited due to the defined design layout around the content of the subpage which coould not be altered. These types of limitation can be difficult - however by understanding the whole context and focusing on the content of the subpage within one’s control, it can still enable its optimisation.
Key Objectives were as followed:
