For a UX Design course on Springboard.com, I took on the large task of reorganizing and redesigning the Iowa State University College of Design Website. Their existing website was hard to navigate, and had an outdated design which made it stand out from other colleges at the same university.
First, I started with understanding how the current website works. Here are some problems I observed:
- There are three navigation bars: One above the heading, one below, and a vertical "Our College" menu on the left
- Content is deeply nested inside of those menus, which makes finding pages difficult
- The design is outdated, and doesn't match Iowa State University branding
Next, I created a new site map, with pages grouped by category. Organizing
them in this way allowed the site to move to a single navigation bar.
After figuring out the navigation, I determined the most important content for the home page. This allowed me to come up with a simple layout, with a clear visual hierarchy.
The red header and grey navigation bar follow the design guidelines from the university.
