Office of Academic Personnel Site Redesign
Project Overview
The University of Washington’s Office of Academic Personnel (OAP) wanted to update and redesign their website to a more user-friendly, faculty-focused experience. We collaborated with various members of their office on the best way to update their site and bring it onto our WordPress theme so it was easier for them to edit long-term.
My Role & Responsibilities:
UX Research
Competitive Analysis
UX Survey
User Informational Interviews
Website Analytics
Stakeholder Engagement
Ideation
Proto-Personas/Personas
Sitemapping
Wireframing/Prototyping
Content Strategy
Project launch
Other Members: Jeff Hendrickson, Anne Fernandez, various partners from UW’s Office of Academic Personnel
Timeline: 8 months
Project launch date: May 29, 2024
“…[D]evelop a dynamic and welcoming OAP website to effectively serve our faculty, staff and by extension students and our key stakeholders.”
- Fredrick Nafukho, Vice Provost of the Office of Academic Personnel
Competitive Analysis
Knowing the project was going to start sometime late fall, I took some extra time I had in the summer to do some of the pre-research, namely the competitive analysis. After developing a competitive analysis template that could also be used on future projects, I analyzed 5 sites (including the OAP site) to get a better understanding of the subject matter and get inspiration. Through this competitive analysis I learned just how broad and wide ranging departments like these can be. Each university that I looked into seemed to have a different academic structure and way of managing the logistics. Even within the UW system there was a separate office for UW Med.
Some information architectures that I observed, such as a site from Texas A&M, gave me some ideas for the redesign. The competitive analysis also inspired some key questions around the functionality of UW’s OAP specifically and how we could best adapt the website to fit the needs of OAP’s unique structure and functionality overall.
Proto-Personas
Through meetings with our OAP partners I was able to determine the three most key users to think about when designing the site— prospective/outside people interested in becoming an academic personnel member, current faculty and unit administrators/academic support staff.
Anita was the proto-persona for prospective/outside people that are looking to start their careers in academia. She is a STEM graduate in her mid-late 20s who wants to continue her research and is looking for a community.
Nicky was the proto-persona for unit administrators. Unit administrators support the work that the academic personnel do at the UW. Some of Nicky’s goals included needing to understand how to work with and navigate the various aspects of academic HR and finding ways to connect with others in the UW community.
Peter was the proto-persona for current faculty at the UW, taking on the role of someone who has been with the university for some time. Is goals in relation to the site revolved around understanding his own benefits and leave time along with contributing to his department’s leadership.
User informational interviews
Valuable user quotes about the OAP site
“So I have bookmarks saved now and part of that was because it was not easy to navigate and we would get lost and get sent in so many different directions, so the pages or the resources that I frequent I have saved so I can go right to it.”
— UW unit administrator #2
“As a person on the first year on the tenure track, I was feeling very anxious, and I wanted to see if there was any mental health support for new faculty. I googled it, and probably ended up in [the OAP] website, but I wasn’t able to find anything specific when I ended up looking for it.”
— UW faculty member #1
“…there are almost too many resources because at times, one resource can lead you to another link to another link, maybe to an expired link and outdated link, one that repeats the same information, so sometimes you have to filter what content that is helpful for you.”
— UW unit administrator #3
For our informational interviews I conducted 7 in total— 1 librarian, 4 unit administrators (2 longtime UW users and 2 new UW users) and 2 newer faculty members. These interviews uncovered issues with navigation, old and/or contradictory content on the site and sometimes lack of understanding of what the office did. From the conversations with the faculty members in particular we learned that they usually didn’t directly access this site themselves but relied on their unit administrators and academic leadership to guide them to the right information.
Survey
To get a broader understanding of the user experience of this site, we conducted a survey from Dec. 1-21, 2023.
Breakdown of the 160 participants:
Academic unit leader: 12 or 7.5%
Faculty member: 49 or 30.6%
Emeritus faculty member: 1 or 0.6%
Librarian: 9 or 5.6%
Unit administrator: 82 or 51.3%
Our survey participants broke down into 6 distinct groups— Unit administrators, faculty members, frequent users (participants who visited weekly or more), rare users (participants who visited a few times an academic quarter or less), New UW users (participants who have been at UW for 2 years or less) and longtime UW users (participants who have been at UW for 6 to 30+ years). Two of the most standout pieces of information was the fact that 82% of frequent users are unit administrators and conversely 84% of faculty members are rare users.
Persona
After the research we refined our proto-personas into personas— Nina, Jean and Daniel. We integrated pain points, needs and goals into each to create a more full picture of the people that the site is meant to serve. Including information such as UW employment history, website usage (frequent v rare), needs/goals and technical challenges and considerations were key base components for us to best understand and serve each particular persona. Working on these personas also gave us the opportunity to develop a personas template for future projects.
Nina Miller serves as the persona for unit administrators at the UW. One of Nina’s technical challenges/considerations is the fact that she heavily leverages bookmarks and Google search to navigate the OAP site and get to the information she needs. This point was backed up by all aspects of the research, including the website analytics. She also tends to go to OAP personnel with her questions instead of trying to dig for the answers because it is easier.
We used data from New UW users that also identified as faculty to create a “New Faculty” persona named Jean Kumar. With Jean we are able to gain insights into what perspective academic personnel would need or be interested in since she recently was one. One particular interesting aspect of her user behavior is the fact that typically she doesn’t visit the OAP site at all. Instead, she relies on information from unit administrators and academic leadership in her department to answer her questions.
Daniel Gray is a persona for a recently tenured professor at the UW who is heavily involved in research and academic leadership roles. Things important to him in regards to the site include benefits, sabbaticals and promotion and reappointment information that could pertain to the post-doctoral researchers that he works with.
Sitemapping
Old Menu Navigation
The existing menu navigation for the OAP site mostly followed how their office was structured internally. This meant that the ‘Academic HR’ section in the menu was extremely overloaded in comparison to the others. Because unit administrators like Nina tended to navigate the site using Google search and bookmarking pages, I knew that disrupting the URLs within the actual site structure would’ve caused more challenges for users down the road. It also would increase the scope of the project and so it was decided that for site structure changes those should be done later, in phased approaches.
New Menu Navigation
After presenting an initial new menu solution, we refined it with the help of our OAP partners to one that highlighted the important aspects of OAP and was more user-friendly. Previously, the ‘For Academic Personnel’ section was buried under ‘Academic HR’ in the menu. Because the menu allows us to have some variation from the site structure, that particular section was pulled out to highlight it for new and current academic personnel. Within the site structure itself, it remained nested under Academic HR (AHR) though both because organizationally that content is a part of AHR and also to not break any URLs. ‘Academic jobs’ was also pulled out of the AHR menu section to highlight it and make it easier for prospective personnel to locate.
Purple Menu Navigation
In the UW theme there is a secondary purple menu in the top right hand corner that typically provides links to various general populations for the university (Students, Parents, Faculty & Staff, Alumni). If this menu is customized it is focused on relevant, external sites for that particular site. For this redesign we made a few changes to their already customized purple menu that would compliment the new white main menu navigation. Linking to UW Human Resources (UW HR) was still important but we included links to Faculty Senate, UW Finance and the new link to Workday Employee Help as well. (The last was previously known by a different name and URL and was going through a transition while this redesign was happening.) We no longer had to link to the UW main homepage because that was already linked in the header via the W logo on the left.
Wireframes/Prototyping
Top left is the original OAP homepage with the initial hand drawn low-fidelity wireframes to the right of it. Below them are the two mid-fidelity options that I mocked up. On the far right is the second version of the mid-fidelity wireframes that we created after receiving feedback from our OAP partners.
The next stage was to wireframe out the pages that got a full redesign, including the homepage, the AHR landing page and the For Academic Personnel page. For the homepage I sketched out two different low-fidelity options before making mid-fidelity mockups to share with our OAP partners and leadership. Through discussions we came up with second mid-fidelity version that merged elements from both initial options which you can see on the far right in the image above. Providing a clear pathway to the AHR landing page was a crucial piece in redesigning the OAP homepage due to both it’s importance and because many users were confused on if there was a difference between OAP and AHR.