BetterCarletonCentral -Website Redesign

Group project

1. Introduction
Carleton Central is the center for Carleton students and their community to do any school-related interaction. It is the major resource used by the student to continue studies at the University. Anyone with the account can access the database, they can modify their personal information, change emergency settings, pay tuition fees, receive scholarships, check class schedules, add or drop courses, and so much more.

Carleton Central has such an important status among the Carleton community, its user interface remains unchanged for a long time and is considered out-of-date in the modern standard. The site has no visual organization, too much information appears on one single page without proper formatting. The design of Carleton Central may prevent future student to choose Carleton as their University, and withdraw potential business partners. The website is part of the student experience, but the university may receive a bad reputation for not providing students with good online support.

The problem the team tries to solve is to make the website more visually appealing, easier to navigate and prevent having only hyperlinks on one single page. Carleton Central is used by several age groups, so our group’s job is to find a balanced design that can suit the entire community.

2. Project Overview
Carleton Central needs a facelift. A new user interface will rebuild user navigation and create a better layout for content reading. This will rely on four major roles which including branding, design, framework and database. Each of them will heavily depend on each other for completing the project. The team will be using the existing Carleton-Brand-Standards as the branding guideline.

3. Management Strategies
This is not a small project but will be a great opportunity to work effectively as a team. A team manager is essential to this task, and two sub-groups of the design and development team should be formed as well. Agile Scrum methodology will be used to keep this project on track, scrum meeting will host weekly to insure the promised deliverable is realized. The scrum master each week will document all the processes and take minutes to ensure project progress is documented and adhered to by each group member.

Timeline

Screenshots of the Website:

4. Individual contribution
As a member of the design team, my job is heavily on the design task and user survey. At the beginning of the project, I created a user survey to collect information about what users expect from our product, to plan out the desired function of the website. Based on the data of the survey, I created four user persona to represent different user groups. Each user was given a detailed biography to make them believable.  Besides, I helped with the design of the navigation map by researching the principles of site maps and refine the old one using Adobe XD.

After the project officially started, I have created around 30 icons in total to be used in the entire site, including section and sub-section icons. I helped our marketing campaign, created posters and made a marketing PowerPoint for the group presentation. During the test stage of the project, I also created a test survey for the user to test our website. In the meantime, I changed mock-ups before coding team code it, write registration part of the user manual, altered the team headband design, posted Notes from the Usability Testing and Test Report at the end of design studio on culearn form. 

When we get into the final stage of the project, I provided page assets for programmers and assisted in making the final presentation. I help out tasks that the team needs from start to the end.

5. Project management techniques
Our group following Agile Scrum methodology throughout the term. Each member has contributed to Jira and confluence. The specific information on this section can be seen in the Project Management System assignment along with all the screenshot and detailed descriptions.

Thanks for reading!