Yale School of Art Redesign
This project was created for my Experience and Interaction class where we were tasked with redesigning a website to improve it's poor user experience. I focused my redesign on the homepage and publications page.
Role
Designer
Timeline
May 2022
Tools
Figma, Photoshop
UI Design, Rebrand
Challenge
Redesign a weak website by analyzing the user experience associated with the website and propose design changes.
01 Analyze
I began by analyzing the user experience by browsing through the Yale School of Art website.
What doesn't work
Individual white backgrounds on text can be distracting and clutters the website
Homepage lacks consistency, consolidation, and direction. What are the users' next steps supposed to be?
The school news is displayed poorly as the additional read more hyperlink is an unnecessary addition.
Much of the text fails to demonstrate typographic hierarchy. All of the text is in uppercase and the repeated use of white backgrounds makes it difficult to differentiate between titles, headings, and body text.
The interfaces are frustrating and overstimulating with the lack of a design system, the distracting background animations, and congested information.
Information Architecture
Redesigned Sitemap
I recreated a new sitemap by consolidating and removing the webpages that were irrelevant to the school of art, such as Yale undergrad application information.
Original Sitemap
One issue that I noticed as I created the sitemap for the original website was that there was lots of unnecessary repetition. For instance, the homepage displayed multiple pages that could already be found in the top navigation bar.
02 Lo-fi Sketches
My focus was on redesigning the homepage and publications page. Through my redesigns, I aimed to eliminate negative space and simplify the interface to make it more professional. To improve the user experience, I added more focus to the navigation bar elements and categorized the bulky information into digestible pieces.
