For my second client this semester, I had worked with BELCO Education/Alliance, to create a design for a more functional, modern website for their nonprofit. For this task, again, Figma was used to create the design, as well as add interactivity, to give the stakeholders/users, a better sense of how the website would look like, and function, once fully developed in the next phase. Work in this group was divided in the group by webpage, with the exceptions of a few shared assets. For example, typically a header and footer would stay consistent throughout the entirety of the website, so while I created these on the page I designed, these were utilized site wide. On my part, I designed the Partner Institutions page. As far as incorporating interactions, I soon as my page was designed, I continued working by adding the Figma interactions for buttons and links and the header/footer to navigate between the pages. For deeper interactions, like drop-down menus and hover animations, this was done by other team members, as I have a lot yet to learn about Figma interactions
My group and I also user tested our designs with teachers, as well as the target audience (international students, and those with plans to study abroad), helped to solidify specific design choices, and find exactly what information students would wish to see on a site for them. An example of this, was that when I had interviewed a potential user in the target audience and tested the stakeholder’s outdated website. In doing so, the interviewee had felt there was a lack of information about the organization, the information that was there was hard to understand, and there was a perceived focus on partner institutions, and not on students, which was confusing and disheartening. All things that were changed in the design, and even further in the development of the website.
Personally, I am an international student, so I felt as though I also had some base to work from when initially creating the design, though these thoughts needed to be validated by other users as well. I feel as though a bit too much time was allocated to user research, that I would have loved spending on the actual design, though I feel this way because I believe project simply didn’t have enough time to both get substantial user testing, and time to design thoughtfully and iteratively. Though I believe without the user testing, valuable insights would have been lost, so I recognize the importance here.
Design wise, I and my group took a general style of BELCO’s outdated website and modernised it. We kept the same colour palette, same font, and expanded on some of the original site’s ideas, like having low opacity shapes in the background. Something that was in their original website, but fell short of being interesting, as it was lacking variation, and the positioning felt too static, and not organic enough. Information was clearer to read and navigation from page to page made more sense. I would have loved more time on this project, and more frequent interactions with the stakeholders that were often slow to respond due to time zone differences, to add even more information into the website for students, however with what information I had about BELCO’s organization, we displayed this information in a very clean and clear way.
When comparing the design of our website, to that of the client’s original design, I believe the design has been improved upon in every way. There were a few hiccups along the way, scheduling and planning wise that made this project feel rushed at times, but in the end, I and my team delivered a design that resonated with the stakeholders and users alike.
Group BELCO Link
