GEORGIA TECH CAREER CENTER SITE REDESIGN
Simplifying Students' Preparation for Work Terms
Beginning in the latter half of the summer of 2018, one major design project I spearheaded during my stint at the Georgia Tech Career Center (then called the Career Discovery and Development or "C2D2") was the architectural restructuring and redesign of the undergraduate student section of the center's website. Following my initiative of scanning each page’s content prior to restructuring, and utilizing design mockups that I created, the information analysts and my fellow student assistants were able to create a set of pages that consolidated information for students and reduced the number of potential steps needed to find important information.
The problem:
How can we help students find what they need to successfully obtain and log internships and co-ops during their studies at university?
My Role:
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UI/UX Designer
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UX Researcher
The Team:
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UX Designer/Researcher
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Front End Engineer
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Product Manager
Tools Used:
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Interviews
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Adobe Creative Cloud
My Contributions:
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Interviewing users
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Design of UI elements
The Process:
​Empathize
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Customer interviews
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Identify personas
Specify
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Prioritize persona needs
​Ideate
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Sketches
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Low-fidelity mockups
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Multiple versions of task UI
Bring to Life
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Full mockups created in Adobe CC
​Verify
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Track student usage of site and facility post-implementation
Outcomes:
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System of UI artifacts for facilitation of site navigation
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These artifacts would remain despite a university-wide design system overhaul.​
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Increased usage of the Career Center by students
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An expedited finding of resources led to a greater frequency of facility usage.​
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APPROACHING THE ISSUE
This project began with the issue of placing information on the career center from a new student handbook on the center’s website. After examining the site, however, we found that finding the right ways to include the content may be challenging, which led to the proposal for the redesign. After discussing the matter with my fellow intern, the career services director, and one of the undergraduate advisors, we decided to talk to a handful of other students who utilized the facility as well as rely on our own experience.
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Another key proposal I put forward at the time was to audit the information contained on each page of the site:
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What pages had duplicate information?
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What pages lacked crucial information relevant to the page's title and description?
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Was any crucial information difficult to find?
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After gathering some feedback and extrapolating some other potential points from classmates and personal experience, we narrowed down three main user groups: new students who don't know where to begin, students looking for essential, specific information, and students who received an offer and need to log their work term for academic credit.
OUR PERSONAS
Incoming Student: SAMSON
Samson is in his first year at Georgia Tech pursuing a BS in Mathematics. He knows that he wants to eventually get an internship in his major, but he is not sure where to begin. From word of mouth, he has learned about the Career Center, and he hopes to figure out where the best place to start looking would be. Samson is also quite an introvert and is afraid to ask others for help, so he seeks his answers online.
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Age: 18
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Hometown: San Francisco, CA
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Motivations: knowledge, fear, incentive
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Personality: introvert, anxious, meticulous, planner
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Goals:
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Find where university jobs are posted
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See if there is a person he can reach out to
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Find resources to find the right field of work for him
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Frustrations:
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Has difficulty finding job resources online
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Doubts what line of work fits best with him and his choice of major
Experienced Student: EVA
Eva is an international student from Sweden in her second year at Georgia Tech as a Computer Science major. Hoping to earn some money on her own, she wants to secure an internship in her field. After browsing some job listings on the Career Center job board and attending a few career fairs, she has found that there is more she must figure out as an international student who aims to work in the US. Despite having a wide friend group, her other international friends aren't sure. She also forgot to pack her suit with her and needs to get a new one quickly.
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Age: 21
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Hometown: Uppsala, Sweden
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Motivations: financial stability, knowledge, social
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Personality: extrovert, frugal, planner, active
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Goals:
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Find resources for international students
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Learn where to find inexpensive professional attire
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Find internships on the job board
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Frustrations:
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Has difficulty finding international resources online
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Strives to save money but cannot find sources of cheap interview clothes
New Hire:
CALEB
Caleb has just secured his first internship for the summer of his junior year as an Economics major. He knows that he can earn academic credits for it, but he is not sure how he can do that. He also has not received much help other than "Just go to C2D2" when asking his friends about it. Unfortunately, all of the career advisors are booked, and he needs to have his internship sorted soon.
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Age: 20
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Hometown: Atlanta, GA
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Motivations: achievement, growth, financial stability
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Personality: motivated, extrovert, quick-tempered, friendly
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Goals:
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Register an internship with the university
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Earn credits for an internship
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Learn what needs to be done during an internship
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Frustrations:
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Has trouble finding where to register an internship with the university
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Does not know what mid-internship assessments are needed
REDESIGNING PAGES
Both I and my fellow intern believed it best to remove the submenus from the site and try to consolidate the information present on the pages that would appear in the submenus. Reducing the number of menu items was also important so that new users would not get overwhelmed.
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The first design I approached was the landing page for the undergraduate section.
Rather than present the users with a blurb of text and a navigation bar, we decided that a block layout would be the best way to approach it, as it would provide a simple explanation of each component.
Each block would also be a menu item, meaning that someone mousing over the undergraduate item on the navigation bar could just click on one of the menu items if they know what they are looking for.
This approach would accomplish two things:
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It would give new users an idea of where to look first without providing too much information,
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It would keep more experienced users or students with offers already from having to browse for information about registering and logging their work terms.​
My mockups of the Experiential Learning and Undergraduate home pages with the block links displayed.
A similar approach was made for some of the pages on the menu, such as the experiential learning page, albeit with the navigation bar present but with more text explaining what that program entails. The rationale for this was similar: simplifying information and organizing it to reduce duplication and empty pages. This also served to limit the number of items in the navigation bar menu as well.
REORGANIZING INFORMATION
On sections pages such as "Co-ops" and "Internships," the previous architecture of information divided up the information about the program among several pages, oftentimes muddling the relevant information with telling the students why they should take part in it. One idea I had was to organize the content from those pages under headers with questions that the sections answer. From this point, it would reduce the number of steps that individuals would take to get the needed information.
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To reduce the need for scrolling and prevent students from being presented with a wall of text, the information analysts proposed the idea of making each section on the page collapsible, which, while not included in my mockup, was included in the page’s final design. Another approach was to make the bullet points on my mockup of the undergrad landing page behind the color blocks so that they would be visible upon mouse-over.
My mockup of the redesigned Co-ops information page with the accordion links open
IMPACTS AND LEGACY: LAYING THE FOUNDATION
Over the waning months of my time at Georgia Tech, the method I created of documenting and organizing links and information would serve as a model for reorganizing the entire information architecture of several sections of the Career Center website.
Such guidelines are still used across the website to this day, even following the re-brand of the university, and still serve as the basis for navigation and information organization.
The newest versions of the site can be viewed at career.gatech.edu/undergraduate-students
The implementation of the links on the undergraduate homepage, implemented by the staff. Each box has a list of contents of the page to which it links that become visible on mouse-over.
The implementation of the Co-op page, implemented by the staff. The blue links act as accordion links, expanding text below them.