The Project
The University of Washington's HR website was immensely complex. Content had grown organically over a long period of time, leading to a web of confusing and unrelated pages. Legislature which mandates what needs to go on the site only compounded the issue. Going into the project we had four main goals:
bring the site on brand
cleanup and create accessible navigation; wayfinding
improve the information architecture by removing roles (which currently force users to self identify before accessing content) and implementing a human centered design approach
move from a basic html site to a Wordpress CMS to create a dynamic site that would be easily edited and maintained by HR sub-departments.
MY ROLES
I was brought in to be the lead UX designer on the UW HR web refresh project. I was to advocate for UX in an office new to the concept of human centered design.
I conducted a heuristic evaluation, co-created personas, researched competing organizations, organized content, created wireframes, helped design the backend UI, drafted training materials, and brought the site on brand. In tandem I mentored junior staff and presented ongoing work to the executive management team for stakeholder review.
Discovery
To help familiarize myself with UW's new brand I jump started this project by completing a heuristic evaluation of HR's existing site. When I started my career in UX I was given a great guideline to help assess interfaces, portions of which can be seen in the documentation provided below.
Personas
UW HR's website services an extremely broad audience, ranging from millennials to baby boomers. We have remote and local staff and several different appointment types (professional staff, classified staff, classified non-union staff, temporary staff, faculty, and librarians (and yes they are all very different in the world of HR). With management I work to narrow our personas to create a snapshot of our user base. In the end we had roughly 20 different personas to work with, such as;
DARRYL DAVIS (M)
45-54 (BABY BOOMER)
BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON
POSITION INFORMATION:
Registered nurse
Classified staff (full time)
Department of Cardiology
Seattle campus
UW Medical Center
10 Years of service
~5% of overall population
PERFORMANCE INDICATORS:
English as a native language
High-level computer user
Limited access to a computer at work
Work computer located at a general-use workstation (shared space)
Can access HR content through the med center Intranet site, UWHR Web Site, Supervisor
MARIA MAE (F)
<22 (MILLENNIAL)
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
POSITION INFORMATION:
Academic student employee
Student employee
Department of Fine Arts
Seattle Campus
UW
1 Year of service
~10% of overall population
PERFORMANCE INDICATORS:
English as a native language
High-level computer user
Frequent access to a computer at work
Work computer located on desk
Can access HR content through the UWHR Web Site
Stan summers (M)
35-44 (gen x)
Puyallup, WASHINGTON
POSITION INFORMATION:
Maintenance
Classified staff (full time)
Facilities and Finance Office (F2)
Seattle campus
UW
5 Years of service
~7% of overall population
PERFORMANCE INDICATORS:
English as a second language
Low-level computer user
Limited access to a computer at work
Work computer located in break room
Can access HR content through printed materials, UWHR Web Site, Supervisor
Information architecture
Working document to collaborativly explore a new homepage IA
We wanted ensure our users has accessible, seamless navigation. To achieve this we needed to create a new IA for UW HR's website. I had a very big challenge ahead since internally, the HR sub-offices (and key stakeholders) have been used to the same broken system for years now. Change was going to be tough, not to mention the change wasn't limited to a new IA, but an entirely new way of approaching our content.
To help ease concerns I held multiple card-sorting events which included stakeholders and subject matter experts. I used this opportunity to educate while also including key people in the brainstorming process.
Sketching and wireframes
I started to loosely sketch the overall flow the site. We concluded we needed to develop several different templates to accommodate our unique content types. Our templates include the UWHR homepage, the office homepage, lower level content page, news page, an index page, and search.
The executive team was very excited to see what the new HR homepage would look like. We wanted to bring the site on brand while also distinguishing HR from other UW sites. Below are some of the trials we went through before landing on one that worked. Since this is already such a drastic change for HR we decided to keep things simple in an effort to help buffer the change while also allowing the web team to focus on functionality improvements.
Final UWHR homepage layout
A/B testing
Once the UWHR homepage was complete we were able to start work on the individual sub-office pages, the goal of which was to direct users to appropriate content. I explored two options that met the needs of the users and satisfied the concerns of the stakeholders. One mimicked closely the lower level template but included the classic "UW card" element to allow offices to highlight certain content. The other utilized a highly visual navigation and broke away from the structure of lower level pages.
With these pages built we gathered 14 participants to test the different sites. The main concern from management is that users wouldn't be able to navigate properly with the image centric "nav-card" template and would much prefer the expected navigation.
We tested this, and a few other features, through one-on-one sessions (with one dedicated observer). I crafted a series of contextual tasks for users to complete.
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