UCSD Guardian newspaper

Story

The UCSD Guardian has been the main newspaper for the student undergrad and grad population for over 50 years. As part of the web development team we were responsible for the comprehensive re-design.

As the UX designer, I helped optimize huge amounts of content by creating intuitive structure.

overview

Role: UX Designer

Tools: Paper Pen, Indesign, Sketch, Wordpress

Deliverable: Live website. It is the current website for UCSD undergraduate news.

Current Design Evaluation

Evaluation of the current platform was necessary in order to identify the usability breakdowns. Every page was tested to understand when and where users' experienced frustrations with the interface. These usability issues were consolidated and taken into account in the redesign.

Surveys and interviews

As a team we wanted to not just fix current usability issues, but really add value to the website. We approached this through a content reorganization informed by user surveys and interviews. We also worked with the client to identify future directions of the design in order to take into account their vision.

Mockups

Once we synthesized our user research and got a clearer understanding of the direction of the redesign, we moved on to creating multiple iteration of the prototypes. We started with lo-fi paper mockups and and InDesign wireframes, and subsequently progressed to hi-fi screens.

High fidelity prototypes

As the visual designer I created prototypes of the responsive platforms we wanted to cater to. This ensured that we had a clear vision for the site going into development.

Development

Despite initially wanting to switch away from the Wordpress CMS, we decided after a lot of consideration to stick with it and instead switch over to a template framework that was basically a blank space, which would allow us much more freedom to configure the design of the website as we saw hit. It also allowed us to roll over content from the previous website (almost a decades worth) with much less hassle than it would have been otherwise.

Final Design

After initial development, we decided to roll out a MVP, in order to maximize usage and feedback. The website is still a work in progress but as a team we are happy with where it's at, especially compared to the old product. Check out ucsdguardian.org for a better look.

Future considerations: Dashboard desiGN

As a potential future direction the newspaper expressed interest in utilizing data visualization in order to optimize reader engagement. I created the visual design behind some of the proposed dashboard functions.