Prompt

Founded in 1841, the Maryland School of Pharmacy makes strides in furthering medical research. Offering life science research and other community-focused programs, it’s no wonder why it’s a very sought-after school. But the website was not as appealing, and certainly not easy to use, which is what UMB tasked our class to try and fix, especially in a time where most of the application process is done online.

My Role	Time Frame	Skills
Interface and Prototype Designer in a team of three. Proposed wireframes, discussed usability, user flow, and administered person testing. Wireframes were created in Photoshop.	4 months, September 2020	Interaction Design, Web Design, User Personas, SAS Information Cataloging, Wireframing, Prototyping

Our Process, and Solution

As the current climate drove more and more users to online usage of features such as meetups, class registration, and seeking answers to their questions about deadlines and start dates, the need for a rework was high. My team and I tackled this problem with massive amounts of research that resulted in a proposed complete rework of the website’s layout. What worked for one platform did not work for another, and users were getting tired of having to spend a lot of time scrolling and manually searching to find what they were looking for.

So, after analyzing that many of the problems came from the ability to navigate and find information, the first step was to establish our target audience, which, with our personas, we surmised to be within the age range of 20 to 40 years old, all busy and working towards a goal, all personas that need their information to be readily available.

We wanted the user to be able to go from one point to another without getting lost, without getting distracted from looking for a feature that was supposed to be there, but was not. We wanted a simple, readily available redesign that allowed for the immediate retrieval of whatever the user wished, and, from the results of our test, our proposed hierarchy was a large step in the right direction. Which made the rework of UMB’s website that much more easy to accomplish.

When our team got approval from UMD, we went on to the next step, working and re-working our design for the website, as time went on, eventually creating a in-depth mockup of the application that, served to inform without overwhelming the user, one that accompanied and guided the user through every possible action, and one that UMB eventually expressed praise and approval for being able to offer so much without the need to scroll.

The big takeaway, for me, was that, while information must be made available for viewing and retrieval, many tend to lose sight of the fact that it needs to be able to be accessed if its services are to be used. Otherwise, not only will people miss out on opportunity, the school itself could lose interested students, which could lead to troubles for both areas in the foreseeable future. Through just putting ourselves in others’ shoes, we were able to find these problems and change how they were solved, and I am very grateful to have worked with others that, like me, put the user first in everything we decided to do.

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Published @ 2024-03-05 17:23