Create Diversity Through Mixture of Young People With Ambitions

This is a UX case study that I did during my studies in collaboration with the school. The aim for the project was to solve a real user experience problem for an external client and to create a digital solution that creates trust and drive users to reuse the product.

Goals for the project

• Implement the UX Honeycomb model to make the website more usable for the target audience so it creates a desire to reuse it.
• To make it easier for the user to find relevant content with less effort and frustration.
• Make Aarhus Academy’s values more visible for their target audience on the new website redesign.

Main Challenges

Before diving deep with the project, I conducted three usability tests of their current website – and from the tests I gathered some useful insights that helped me to define the main challenges.

User Personas

The personas are a representative of users with a story, needs, motivations and frustrations etc. They are also a representation of the characterizing traits of each user.

Information Architecture

The first step to create a better user experience for the target audience was to rebuild Aarhus Academy’s IA.

I did that by using my persona’s needs and frustrations and Aarhus Academy’s business goals as well as looking at the current IA and other schools’ website for inspiration.

The final IA was developed by the help of card sorting tests on
Optimal Workshop.

UX Solutions

A few solutions have been made to make it easier to navigate on the new re-designed website and find information with less effort.

01. Submenu on the sidebar

It was decided to place the submenu on subpages on the left side. The previous one blended too much with the background and was centered. The arrows were placed to indicate that there’s more content for the user.

02. Mega menu

One of the solutions was to create a mega menu with headlines since a drop-down menu was insufficient based on my tests.

03. New visual expression

Give the design a new visual expression with a more welcoming/inviting and less conservative tone of voice in the copy within the boundaries of their current identity.

Final Visual Design

The final design includes all the different solutions of UX that were chosen to be applied during the design phase of the project while maintaining consistency within the boundaries of the school’s general design.

You can read the report for the whole project by clicking here It consists of 104 pages with problem statement, process and conclusion.