Improving Usability of the OSU Find Your Major Site

Improving Usability of the OSU Find Your Major Site

Research, Strategy, UX Design, Prototyping

Problem: The Find Your Major webpage for prospective OSU students was information heavy, hard to navigate, and not visually pleasing to use.

Goal: Improve the design by prioritizing usability and enhancing the visual appearance of the page to encourage user interaction.

My Role: UX researcher and designer working alongside a development team. I conducted interviews and usability studies, created paper and digital wireframes, and accounted for accessibility in the designs.

Before & After

The Process

Empathize: Our primary user group for this project was prospective OSU students, typically between 16-19 years old, who were searching for a college major before making a decision on where to apply.

Define: The team focused on improving the design by prioritizing usability and enhancing the visual appearance of the page to encourage user interaction.

Ideate: I provided design feedback and mockups throughout the process for the development team.

Prototype: The development team created the prototype site utilizing digital mockups I provided in Adobe XD.

Test: I conducted moderated UX tests with users asking them to complete tasks in our prototype site to understand and identify pain points. Some challenges for our audience included: naming conventions of search terms, grouping of buttons that made it unclear what step to take next, and using search versus the filtering system to find content.

What I Learned: The team iterated on research findings and design revisions until we were happy with a "final" product that met our goal. I learned a lot about communication throughout the process and appreciated making small adjustments based on user feedback to improve the overall design.