Context
The redesign of the Fuqua Alumni website from 2012–2013 was a comprehensive user-centered redesign project. This project had two primary teams that served as stakeholders: our internal marketing team and the alumni department.
The project began with a user experience study and initial rough wireframes that were handed off from an outside contractor. From there, I was responsible for scaling the site to secondary and lower-level pages and designing a responsive experience.
My Role: Interaction and Visual Designer & Web Developer
I was the project lead for the IT web team, and I provided visual design, responsive HTML/CSS for the project as well as interaction design for the embedded application and form features. This was Fuqua’s first responsive website.
Interaction Design
This was a content-heavy site with several use cases that were not defined in the user study, requiring significant interaction design that was informed by the results of the discovery process.
Secondary pages required custom designs to accommodate highlighting unique features within their categories.
Filtering alumni events required filters that consider location and multiple simultaneous categories of data.
Front-End Development
The HTML/CSS implementation required significant work and rework with the development team to integrate features with legacy systems, most notably the events calendar.
Style Guide
To wrap up the project, I composed a detailed style guide was developed to provide guidance for future work on the site.
Challenges
Stakeholder challenges for this project included coordinating between the alumni and marketing teams, which both had competing priorities, which drew the project out over two years.
As well, some stakeholders had become attached to content display features that were sub-optimal, but were used in legacy systems that weren’t in scope for modifying, such as feature carousels, in-page tabbed content, and collapsible accordion content. These requirements increased technical complexity to ensure that both responsiveness and accessibility needs were met.
Outcome
The new website received praise from the Alumni team, and provided an improved experience for alumni content that aided in the increase of revenue seen by the department. This was Fuqua’s first full-featured responsive site and was able to run off of the existing, sub-optimal legacy content-management system. Stakeholders were very happy with the results and the site remained in place until the next major redesign several years later.