Role:
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Tools:
Figma
Qualtrics
SMART Lab Eye Tracking
Timeline:
5 Months
Overview
My Role
My team of 5 was tasked with completing the complete End-to-end UX process, together we completed our effort. I worked across every stage of the process, Client meetings, field observation, the survey, interviews, personas, the prototype, usability testing. Although this was a Team project, I wasn't stuck in one lane.
The Problem and Vision
The UVU Registrar's Office takes care of the stuff students can't afford to mess up. Registration, Graduation, Transfer credits; And almost nobody used its website to find any of it. It wasn't so much that it wasn't useful, it just wasn't recognizable, available, or usable. Students were struggling to find where to go for important information about their education.
The Registrar's Office Website is available to help students succeed and prepare for the future through Graduation, Registration and Transfer of Credits information and actions. Our goal is to make the Registrar's Office website more recognizable, available, and usable for students to be prepared and succeed
Scope and Needs
Challenges with the Current Site
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Inconsistency in style and feel/theme.
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Not a unified department
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They want to make more of a brand for the registrar’s office
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They want to identify all of the categories under the service of “registrar”.
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Content = Always a challenge. Getting the right amountof information is very tricky. They don’t know if they are
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fulfilling those needs. Do they need to put more important things first?
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If someone wants to come to the graduation department (for example), no one knows who to go to → The Registrar's Office.
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They need to make sure that the language they use translates to be more user friendly to the audience aka the students.
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They do not want the administration of things on the outer face of the website. They want to make that more of a personal thing.
Updates to the Website
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Focus on the Audience
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Students
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Counselors
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Parents
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Highlight the 3 big topics most people look for
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Registration
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Transfer Credits
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Graduation
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Quickly and easily answer questions people are looking to have answered on the UVU website
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Let people know what the Registrar’s Office is so they can know what office to contact for their needs
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Highlight the quick response and high quality of the Registrar’s Office Customer Service
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Easily Accessible from the UVU website
Discovery
Client Kickoff
We met with Registrar's staff to scope the work. It wasn't only navigation. The office didn't read as one department in students' heads, the site looked inconsistent, and the language sounded like internal admin-speak. Staff handed us four pages to anchor the landing page: Registration, Graduation, Transfer Credits, Transcripts.
Field Observations
I watched students in the Hall of Flags, right outside the office, in a busy hallway. About 90% were glued to a phone. No signage to interrupt them. That told me what the website had to do: if students walk past the office in real life, the site has to do the work of being found. It can't assume anyone knows the office exists.
Survey
We asked 47 students where they'd go for registration info. Only 17% said the Registrar's Office. More than half said an advisor. The rest Googled it. Graduation was worse, the office tied with Google at 15%.
Then I interviewed a three-year UVU student. She'd never heard of the Registrar's Office. She'd almost certainly used it to transfer credits, but didn't know that's what it was called.
Eye-Tracking Testing
I ran students through real tasks in the UVU SMARTlab using the Eye tracking technology they have. Eye tracking measures either where the eye is focused or the motion of the eye as an individual views a web page. This allows us to see through the users eyes and get insights about visual attention on a certain website. I gave them a set of easy tasks as well and let them get a feel for the website.
It backed up the survey:
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They couldn't find how to apply for graduation from the homepage.
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They couldn't find transfer credits from the homepage.
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They didn't know what the Registrar's Office was or where to look.
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They wanted these in the nav, under their own tabs. Not buried.
The eye-tracking took "findability problem" and made it something you could watch happen. Their attention never landed where the answers were.
Strategy
Personas
I built three personas to focus the attention of the design on our audience. A senior trying to graduate. A transfer student. A high schooler signing up for gen-eds. Each enters through a different task. Kept us honest about real entry points instead of designing for a generic user.
Design Principles
Based off of the needs and challenges of the current website we picked five design principles to focus on and each one drove an actual decision.
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Hick's Law cut the landing page to those four categories. Fewer choices, less paralysis.
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Law of Common Region boxed each task's subpages into clear sections. You can see what belongs together at a glance.
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Peak-End Rule and the Aesthetic-Usability Effect pushed a cleaner look. A site that looks legit gets trusted enough to use.
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Tesler's Law was the reality check. Transcripts, AP and CLEP paths — some of it's just complicated. So we organized it instead of burying it.
Iteration & Testing
Wireframes, Surface Comps, & Prototype
From there I built the site map, wireframes, high-fidelity surface comps and prototypes for desktop and mobile. All of it on UVU's existing design system, so the office could ship it without a rebrand. All of it based on our discovery, research and design principles to actually create a solution to the problems we are trying to solve.
Usability Testing on the Re-Design
I tested the redesign with five students, same tasks. The difference showed up fast. Every one of them found the new Graduation page right away, and a few said out loud how quick it was. On the old site, that path didn't exist for them at all.
One complaint repeated across both rounds: people wanted a clearer way back to the main page. So I fixed it. The last iteration added a visible list of destinations under each landing category, so students could see where a link went before clicking. The testing didn't just approve the design, It actually changed it.
Our UX process and knowledge allowed me to completely re-design a site to fit the needs of the users and create a better product experience, and the usability testing allowed to iron out some of the finer details that users feel while on the site.
Delivery
How it Landed
This is what the full UX process gets you, A product that actually solves the problem it was built to solve.
The deliverable was a tested, high-fidelity prototype and a full design document, built on UVU's own design system so the office could ship it without a rebrand. It closed the exact gap the research opened: zero people could find graduation or transfer paths from the live homepage, and everyone could on ours. We handed it to the Registrar's Office as one of three team redesigns submitted for consideration. The semester ended before they made the call.
Impact
What I'll carry out of it is the value of running the whole arc. Discovery, research, strategy, design, testing, each stage caught something the one before it couldn't, and the product is solid because none of them got skipped. Immersing myself in every part is what let me deliver an experience built around how the audience actually behave and need not how we assumed they would. Designing products that solve problems, and delivering on a level that goes above what users could ever tell is wrong is the difference between something that's easy to use, and actually works.