KAELI NGUYEN
Annenberg Media
Role
Timeline
Tools
Skills
Team
Web Designer, UX Researcher
Feb 2022 - April 2022
Figma, Notion, Google Workspace
Wireframing, UX Research, Prototyping
Connie Xu (Team Lead), Monica Min, Amy La, Megan Phi
Client
USC Annenberg Media is a forward-thinking, professional media outlet that’s completely student run.
Project Summary
Our team conducted user research to identify navigation issues and redesigned the entire site to account for improvements in its information architecture and visual design.
Overview
The Problem Space
Annenberg Media came to us with concerns about their website. They needed help improving the UI/UX of their website within the constraints of Arc Publishing, their content management system.
They wanted to increase their website traffic, streamline the publishing process, and showcase student-produced content in an accessible way that informed a larger audience and potential employers.
Goals
Maintain a consistent and professional brand identity across the entire site.
CONSISTENCY
Organize the structure of the website and its content to allow for easy navigation for all users.
ACCESSIBILITY
Allow editors to express their creativity and ownership over the content they publish.
CUSTOMIZATION
Ensure that every students' work is visible to increase job opportunities.
INCREASE EXPOSURE
The Process
Ideation
Our client drew inspiration from established news networks such as The New York Times, 19th News, and The New Yorker. We also took a look at The Washington Post as a product of Arc Publishing to identify feasibility in design implementation.
We curated a moodboard consisting of ideas for navigation menus and home page layouts. From this, we started to identify design elements that could be relevant to the content that Annenberg Media produces.
User Research
Interviews
To better understand and empathize with the users, we conducted interviews with internal stakeholders which primarily included undergraduate editors and supervising faculty.
Here are some of the questions we asked them:
01
How frequently do you navigate the website?
03
Are there any parts of the website that you believe are more important than others?
02
Do any issues with the website come to mind immediately? If so, please elaborate.
04
What functions or pages do you use most?
User Persona
From our interviews, we created user personas to make our design even more useful, desirable, and valuable to the target audience.
Madeline Porter
Who are they?
Professor at USC, Annenberg Media administrator
Why do they need this product?
Editor for Annenberg Media, manage faculty and students, oversees sections of Annenberg Media
Findings
After our research, we discovered key pain points for editors and readers alike.
01.
Pages feel too cluttered with information
02.
Too many sections in the navigation bar
03.
Search bar is difficult to find
Wireframes
We redesigned three layouts: the home page, section page, and article page.
Lo-Fi
Our low fidelity drafts focused on margin sizing and image placement. There was an emphasis on designing for usability and eliminating redundancy.
We were also mindful of our UX interview findings as we consolidated the news desks into our menu bar items and made it static.
Mid-Fi
After meeting with our client to discuss the low fidelity drafts, we began to make edits to account for their feedback.
We edited the footer to better accommodate for the client’s needs and social media contacts, for example. We also substituted real content for the filler assets to identify and resolve potential publishing issues.
One challenge we came across was citing many authors within the same article on the home and section pages without sacrificing a finesse in the visual design.
Hi-Fi
For our high fidelity iterations, we edited for consistency in our design system across all the templates, settling on our fonts and incorporating the official Annenberg Media logo.
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Check out the prototype!
