Consider Your Users
A once-in-a lifetime idea can lead to heartache if you’re using a website with poor user experience and content strategy. As someone with nearly 10 years of experience in this realm, I understand that user experience (UX) and content strategy can make or break how your users journey and interact with your web property.
I’ve worked in newsrooms, developed websites, and now conceptualize marketing strategies and web properties for a large university. My multidisciplinary educational background — in mass communication, graphic design and information systems technology — is invaluable to how I approach my day-to-day work.
See my major and award-winning projects below.
Projects
The New GWU.edu
After more than a year in development, we've finally launched our new main site. Our goal in this project was to modernize the university's primary, most forward-facing web property. The previous version of this website contained more than 200 pages (yeah, I know). We were able to narrow the property to about 25 total pages by focusing on our most important user: the prospective student.
My primary contributions on this project included wireframing early versions of the website in Adobe Indesign (see an example), mapping the information architecture and potential user journeys, creating user profiles and developing text, video and photo content, as well as custom interactive web elements. I also mined analytics and created user research methods (interviews and surveys) to help inform our strategy in creating this new site.
GW Drupal Editorial Theme Development
After mobile traffic to our properties jumped nearly 400% in less than 8 months, we developed and implemented a new, more responsive Drupal theme that better served those visiting our websites on their phones and tablets. Our new "Editorial Theme" was built to be more modular and to rely less on Drupal's frequently frustrating site placement feature. Our less-savvy web property managers could plug content into incredibly responsive and mobile-friendly pages in an easy and efficient manner. The new theme allows our most novice users to create beautiful, modern websites. My work on this project included wireframing with Adobe's Creative Suite, developing use cases and user journeys and interactions, and working on content strategy solutions to address overarching issues seen in our older Drupal theme.
Our new theme is best showcased on:
Virtual Tour Web Application
In 2013, GW undertook the major goal of developing an immersive tour application that would allow prospective students and their parents to experience what the university has to offer before they ever step foot on its D.C. campus. Partnering with CampusTours, we created a one-of-a-kind web application that has drawn hundreds of thousands of online visitors and was recognized with a Webby Award for Best University Website in 2014. My work on this application involved usability testing, brainstorming and developing content, and application upkeep/maintenance.
Visit the Virtual Tour.
GW News Site Development
The university runs two major websites to share news with faculty, staff, students and alumni. Our redesign goals for GW Today and GW Magazine were to better emulate modern publication websites while simultaneously highlighting major university priorities, such as research initiatives; college, departmental and campus updates; and alumni news. With mobile traffic to GW's news sites growing exponentially each month, it was imperative that the redesigns allowed for interactive storytelling on all platforms. We kept in mind that writing staff with little web experience would be overseeing the upkeep of these sites so ease of use in content publishing was a must. For this project, I fell back on my experience in the journalism industry to inform our user experience solutions. Special attention was paid not only to the reader’s journey and experience, but also to how writers and editors could most efficiently use the content management system.
Commencement Website
Visit GW's Commencement website.
Commencement is a major affair at GW, but unlike at other universities, our commencement takes place on the National Mall, in the shadow of the Washington Monument. This poses many logistical questions for our students and their parents — questions we aim to answer with our Commencement Website.
Before redesigning our commencement website, we mined our analytics and researched user preferences to inform our digital strategy. We discovered major traffic spikes to important student resources in the months leading up to the ceremony. We also discovered our most trafficked page on the day of commencement was our scheduling and site plan direction page. While redesigning, we set out to strike a balance between these resource-driven utilities and stoking the excitement of this once-in-a-lifetime experience through interactive web elements highlighting student social media and 360-degree videos.