I led my team in the redesign and implementation of the website, improving visual hierarchy, navigation, and engagement.
The Innovation Hub is an in-house consultancy at the University of Toronto (U of T). Campus partners provide design challenges and teams of interdisciplinary students are hired to work on these projects.
When
May - August 2024
Role
Product Designer &
Project Manager
Team
1 Developer Lead
4 Product Designers
2 Visual Designers
Background and Impact
The Innovation Hub website is where students and U of T partners can find all of the information on working with the organization. The website had not been fully updated since its original launch in 2017. Our team was responsible for finalizing the redesign of all pages and building them in WordPress. As a product designer and project manager, I organized and executed the progression of this project with the team from start to launch.
quantitative impact
This project continues to unfold, so keep a lookout for additional outcomes ahead. In the meantime feel free to visit the website!
Designed A Template For
50+ redesigned pages
Website Visitors Increased By
7k to 9.5k monthly
The website's home page was the most important redesign and the first task we tackled as a newly formed team just onboarded onto the project. The goal was to redesign and build a new home page within 2 weeks. We began by analyzing existing user research.
overall website's primary issues
Comprehensive secondary and primary research conducted the year prior with our two user groups, students and potential partners.
Navigation
User struggled to find the information they were looking for due to ambiguous writing and long pathways
Information Clarity
The Innovation Hub's function/purpose was unclear. "It doesn't tell me what iHub does," said Participant #7.
Information Overload
Overwhelming amount of text. "The repetitive nature of the information made me stop exploring," said Participant #4.
"Why should I care about the Innovation Hub?"
When a user scrolled on the old home page, this question remained unanswered. The home page should encourage users to continue learning about the Innovation Hub. Instead, poor visual hierarchy led to users ignoring sections and "How We Do It" was shown before users understood what "It" was.
The old home page
Whether it was students looking to get involved with the organization or potential partners learning about our work and services, little information about our purpose and previous work was available.
the hurdle
As a team, our challenge with the home page was moving ideas forward. The entire team was new to the project and the number of ways to improve the site seemed infinite. We spent the first few days prototyping individually with little progress and nothing to show.
the jump
In response, I suggested a sketching and vote session. Upon suggestion, I was given the opportunity to facilitate. After sketching, we each presented our ideas and then the team voted on our favourite sketches. I assigned each section based on our results and we were able to move forward to high-fidelity prototyping.
the ceiling
U of T requires all websites to be built with WordPress. In addition, we limited the use of custom code so it could be maintained by anyone. Despite these limitations, we were able to creatively solve many of the previous website's poor layout through intentional design.
In our drafting session we focused on the key issues discovered in research and explored ways to address them within the limitations of WordPress.
We addressed the lack of context on iHub's purpose by beginning the page with an overview of the numbers and stories reflecting our impact on campus, catering to users who are either quantitatively or qualitatively oriented.
The new home page
We increased visual hierarchy by removing unnecessary illustrations and increasing the scale contrast. Doing so allows users to quickly understand who we are without reading every word.
The new home page
We also removed the detailed breakdown of our process in favour of creating buttons leading to each of the level one pages. This way, discoverability is focused on target users.
The new home page
Despite lacking a concrete vision and working within WordPress limitations, we successfully launched the new home page alongside 15+ other redesigned pages within 2 months.
The new home page
reflecting
I believe the team sketching and voting session is what made this home page so successful. In exchange, we lagged behind our project plan schedule, but we caught up by the limited need for large iterations. I learned that knowing when to pause and step back, can actually be the key to making leaps forward.