Design and UX Assistant

From the beginning of my second year (Oct 2021) up to now, I have worked at my school’s library as a Design and UX Assistant. In this role, I work closely with a team of 4 other student designers to make usability improvements on the existing website, redesign library platforms, and other miscellaneous projects as requested by various library departments. Here is some of the projects I’ve worked on so far and my main takeaways from them!

Research & Collections Redesign

Our first main project in this role: redesign the existing UC San Diego Research and Collections section of the library’s website.

Our goal: Revamp the existing Research & Collections section of the site to more accurately represent the modern and diverse collections our library houses.

The Process

Final Designs

Our final iteration of the homepage focuses largely on being user-centric and visually engaging, with many vibrant images and welcoming copy. We chose the header image specifically to be a clear image of our library's physical building, with its iconic architecture front and center. We recognized many students were unfamiliar with the Collections, which is why we wrote a short blurb at the top of the page inviting the user to the Collections page, what it is, and what its mission is.

The Collections Strategists section highlights the people behind the Collections. Although some survey respondents expected this to be at the bottom of the page, we wanted to spotlight the story of the Collections as much as possible and keep the experience human-centered. This is an example of how we balanced user opinions with our stakeholders' visions.

We incorporated images into the Collections & Research Services section to create visual hierarchy. The images are chosen to relate to the work included in each of these Collections areas. This makes the section more distinct and skimmable. The yellow call-to-action buttons invites users to further explore the Collections easily.

Takeaways

This was my first project with a real-world implementation and it was so rewarding to see pages that we researched and prototyped for actually come into fruition after months of work. I learned how to host stakeholder interviews, conduct user research through surveys and A/B testing, and navigate feedback to iterate on a design and make it the best it can be! We learned HTML and CSS to implement the designs ourselves, which was also a huge learning curve, but was so fun to work on together!