BYU-Idaho Career Center Redesign
This project was a complete redesign of Brigham Young University-Idaho’s Career Center website. The Career Center offers services and provides resources for students, faculty, employers, and alumni of BYU-Idaho.
My Role
I was the sole User Experience (UX) Designer and UX Researcher on this project. This included weekly meetings with the heads of the Career Center.
Project Goals
The main goal of this project was to make the Career Center website more interactive and help students understand what they can do at each step in their schooling to prepare for their future careers.
The secondary goal was to push the boundaries of the current website components by creating new, more modern components that could be used throughout BYU-Idaho’s website.
Problem
The current Career Center website offers a lot of information that is not organized in a way that different audiences can quickly see which information applies to them.
The Career Center also wanted to demonstrate the idea that you should be preparing for your future career throughout your entire university experience, not just at the end.
Solution
By categorizing the information into pages for students, faculty, employers & schools, and alumni, it became simple for different audiences to find the information that applied to them.
By creating ‘getting started’, ‘making progress’, and ‘finishing up’ sections on the student page, it was easy for students to see when they should be accomplishing certain tasks to work towards their future career throughout their university experience.
User Research
Assumptions
- Users are overwhelmed by how much information is on the Career Center website.
- Users are confused about how the information on the website is organized and want to quickly know what applies to them.
- Users want to know what they can do to prepare for their future careers throughout their time at university.
Key Findings
I conducted 30 user interviews to test our assumptions and get a deeper understanding of what users appreciate or are frustrated by on the current Career Center website.
- Users would appreciate a layout that shows what steps you can take to prepare for your future career while at school.
- Users were not as confused by information as assumed, but still enough to make reorganizing information important.
- Users do not feel like they could gain anything from the Career Center website until they are close to graduation.
User Personas
The following 4 user personas were created to help me focus on the main target audience groups of the BYU-Idaho Career Center: students, faculty, employers & schools, & alumni.
Competitor Research
Brigham Young University — Career Services
BYU Career Services demonstrates the successful application of the students, faculty, employers, and alumni tabs/pages.
University of Florida — Career Connections Center
The UF Career Connections Center does a great job of showing a clear career prep plan for students to follow throughout their university experience.
Wake Forest University — Office of Personal & Career Development
WFU’s Office of Personal & Career Development also successfully applies a clear career prep path for students to follow by having; start here, explore, get ready, and land it sections.
Design Process
Sketching
After all of the initial user and website research was completed, I started the design process by sketching many variations of each main page of the redesigned website. I used the conducted initial research throughout sketching to make smarter design decisions and to begin redesigning the current websites user experience issues.
Lo-Fi Mockups
After completing the design sketches, I worked with my team to choose the strongest ideas from these sketches. From those strongest sketches, I created wireframes for each of the main pages of the redesign. The completed wireframes were then user tested on 30 individuals from the Career Center’s target audience.
Testing Takeaways:
- Student users liked the idea of having a clear career preparation path for them with the ‘getting started’, ‘making progress’, and ‘finishing up’ pages.
- Faculty, employers, and alumni users appreciated having separate pages to easily find information that applies to them.
- Users thought the quick links to career help resources was helpful.
Hi-Fi Mockups
The next step was to bring the lo-fi mockups to life by adding details such as; colors, typography, and finishing designs for the new components I was creating for the general BYU-Idaho website. I also incorporated changes to the design based on the feedback from the previous round of user testing. These hi-fi mockups were then tested on 20 more individuals from the Career Center’s target audience.
Final Testing Takeaways:
- Faculty users preferred to have information on their page about Career Center appointments that are offered to students.
- Users thought moving the student job board from the Human Resources website to the Career Center website would be helpful.
- Users thought the new Alumni page design was easy to navigate and had helpful information, but some thought it would be helpful to put the most used alumni links at the top of the page.
Final Design
The last step in this redesign project was to add the final changes from the most recent user testing feedback and team feedback.
View the final design here.
Lessons Learned: The main lesson that I learned from this was how important making an easy-to-follow process is for the user. Before this website redesign, there was lots of useful information on the website that was not being utilized. After this redesign, there is now an easy process for students to follow so they can make use of the resources available and know when they should be using them.
What I would have done differently: If I were to start this project over again, I would have spent more time communicating with the web developers that were inputting my design onto the Career Center website. Since I did not, there are discrepancies between my design and what’s on the website since they did not understand how important the exact alignments and such were. I now have learned the importance of cross-team communication and working together through the entirety of the project and not just passing it on.
