Amy Thomas | Senior Designer

I worked with an interdisciplinary team staff and faculty to redesign our existing research website. We wanted a modern look and feel with our new and improved content easy to find. 

User Experience: 

Our first discussions revolved around defining users, once we had a clear idea of each of the five types of users. We set out on defining the journey for each one. A lot of these journeys ended up with overlapping pieces, so we wanted to make sure that the experience for each user was comparable. 

The Build:

Since our content was so robust and we needed to make it easy to find for each user type, I opted to use Drupal as the backend so that I could customize our data access and display. The theme is based on Bootstrap 5 with each element custom styled in CSS and available as an independent component in our style library. 

Biggest Challenge:

The biggest challenge was the large team size and the new data we were tasked to make available. We negotiated these challenges by separating our core team into a weekly staff meeting and then a monthly whole team meeting including the stakeholders. Our finished result has received great feedback.