Source: barnimages.com
Notice anything different?
The department’s web and communications team has spent the past year researching, refreshing and restructuring the department’s website (the site you’re looking at right now) as part of a user experience (UX) strategy. User experience (UX) explores the way we interact with organizations, their services, and their products. UBC Psychology’s website serves a wide range of audiences including students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the general public. The overarching goal with our UX strategy was simple: to make your user experience on our website as friendly, easy, and enjoyable as possible.
We collected data from hundreds of psychology students who told us what they liked—and didn’t like—about the website. To understand our users’ needs, we conducted research using Google analytics, online surveys, user sessions, and we partnered with one of our own visual cognition labs. This helped us understand who our website’s audiences are, what they use the site for, and what areas need changing.
One of the highlights of our UX strategy was our collaboration with the Brain, Attention, and Reality (BAR) Lab. The BAR Lab explores human behaviour and social attention, and the way they operate in our technological world. We worked with the BAR Lab to conduct focus group sessions using eye-tracking software. Session participants navigated through the department website while the eye-tracking software captured their gaze, indicating which parts of the website gain the most attention, and other findings. Combining our UX strategy with the BAR Lab’s innovative research and lab technology led to some important findings that were key to our project.
Heat mapping: this screen capture from an eye-tracking session reveals where user’s gaze is fixated the most.
So what has changed?
Our areas of focus were the overall navigation and visual identity of the website, beginning with the undergraduate and graduate sections of the site. After identifying what information was most accessed on our site, as well as the information our users were having trouble finding, we restructured our menus and page layouts for ease of navigation. We enhanced areas that our users expressed interest in, including our undergraduate Careers and Involvement section, our faculty directory, and a new Get Involved in Research feed. As well, a complete content review and refresh of the graduate section was made by the graduate program coordinator.
We also refreshed the site’s design to better reflect who we are, Canada’s top-ranked psychology department. This included implementing a new typeface, colour palette, and more photography. And if you like our teaching and research stories, you now have the option of sharing them with your friends. These are just a few of many changes we’ve made throughout our UX strategy.
This UX project thrived on feedback from our users and we hope that these changes enhance your user experience on our website.
We want to hear from you! Let us know your thoughts by filling out our website feedback form.
