Interaction Design(IXD) is the Master of Arts program in Cal States University EastBay(CSUEB). It is the program focuses on creating interactive applications and objects as part of a designed user experience.

Our professor show his expectations for this project. In the case of solving existing problems, the website became more professional and attractive.

We start to using Google Analytics to review the user data from the past 3 months for understand the important data like target audience with their demographics and browsing behavior.  The analytics showed that female from the United States were the major target audience followed by India and then followed by China and South Korea. And the user preferred device is desktop over phone and tablet, they use chrome for accessing the website.

These data help us build the basic user information directions and determine the target user for the next research part.  Since the IXD program main target group is people who are interested in design majors, we decide to conduct the research from our school students. I start interview targeted current IXD program students and students from other majors who are interested in IXD program listen their ideas and needs for the website. After collecting interviews and gathering together we found problems mainly focus on lack of information and guidance interaction. In term of visual part the main problems are mostly like the inconsistent styles (font, button etc.) and text heavy.

As an functional website especially university site, the key factor I think is speak clearly with good usability for users that can provide essential information on display not only make users have a better user experience but also rising the higher enrollment rates.
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Starting with drawing user flow looks great place to start.  After the user survey, we conducted several rounds of brainstorming, include analysis of admissions websites of other universities, and improved user flow to make it clearer.

For educational websites, I think the most important thing is information content accessible. Compared with the previous version of the homepage, there are same on both navigation bar and tab bar, as redesign, we remove the tab bar, divide the navigation into 4 categories, Academic, Admission, Student Projects and Faculty, and adjust the size of the navigation bar and font size. In addition, in the home page design, I moved the Apply in the original page from the tab to the top as large button to greatly increase the user's application rate and reduce the user's confusion.
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The homepage is usually the most stylistic page because it is the first impression people have of the website, while for educational websites, it is more about representing the values and teaching philosophy of the school. Considering that the home page has less interaction than other pages, we decided to use professional poster on the header of the home page for display, and another poster down below to represent IXD program philosophy.

Display the program resources on the home page to attract students, such as regular artist forums and game jams event which open up the student’s mind to look at different possibilities after school.

Program details is one of the important information for college school website. Users won’t be apply without knowing about the academic program. So we decide to present the program’s strengths and skills on the academic page, as well as a roadmap of the program. In the layout part, I use the slider to present the program strengths and collapsible course information to making page more clear for users.

As an early student's work, I know that this work is not the most perfect among all my portfolio, but it is the most exciting one for me to participated in the redesign of our major website, while I gained a lot from this project, like how to find the design problems at the beginning to how to find the user pain points from research and efficient cooperation with the team. The next step is to improving by user testing and offering the responsive design on mobile version.