With an enrollment of more than 37,000 Bobcats, we're the fourth-largest public university in Texas. But you wouldn't know we're a big school from visiting our campus. Maybe it's the welcoming environment. Maybe it's the small-town feel of San Marcos. Whatever it is, you'll feel right at home.

Texas State offers nearly 100 bachelor's degrees for students to find their full academic potential. With individualized advising through the Personalized Academic & Career Exploration (PACE) Center or small classes in the Honors College, you are sure to get the attention you need.

I was tasked with a re-design of the undergraduate admissions website from a mobile-first approach. This meant a complete overhaul of the entire Undergraduate Admissions website while working within the limitations of the GATO content management system, and designing a user goal oriented design.

Large scale university websites are notoriously hard to navigate, and with the younger population of users it was apparent that the switch to a mobile first design was needed.

The problems were clear. How do we simplify the navigation, shorten the pages, and make it easy for first time users to get the large amount of information they need to apply and become prepared for university life?

The Texas State Undergraduate Admission office would offer a easy to use website that is organized in a way that is quick and easy to use. Large amounts of information will be seen only if necessary. The motto was "Simple and Clean."

With this redesign there was a lot of information to go through. Nearly everything was outdated, and there was no clear source of what was still being used, and what wasn't. The main idea was to get rid of everything we didn't need so that we could really empsize the things that we did. Every page needed to be easy to read and organized. There is a lot of information to go through, and while signing up for college can be stressful, we wanted to minimize that stress as much as we possibly could on our end.

The website would work like a well structured file system. Each click would take the user to a place that made sense. There would also be different ways to get the user to the same destination that would encourage exploration. We would provide a variety of troubleshooting resources to the user with information before they needed to contact the staff.

We conducted user research and a competitive analysis.
These are some key insights we found that helped with the design:

Don't change personality of the university. The design should be consistent across the site.

Users tend to move fast, miss things, and give up easily. Users are overwhelmed by information easily, and take frequent breaks. Users appreciate simple designs and interactions. Keep it simple.

Large amounts of information makes mobile pages overwhelming. Using ways to hide this information in a list that is well organized is ideal.

My biggest challenge was organizing the vast amount of information. I had to go through the site over and over again to try understand every step along the way so that I wouldn't forget anything. Working with several departments to try and find what they needed, and more importantly what they did not need, was a daunting task.

There were also limitations that were expected when first starting in on the project. Because the website uses a content management system, and we were making a new "template", we also had to think about the back-end user as well as the front-end user. Most of the back-end users were not experienced designers and it was important to keep the options limited so that things didn't get out of control. Managing this balance was challenging.

During this phase we also decided to conduct user interviews using the existing website to see what things were working, or not working. We conducted test on three different groups:

Student Workers
Freshman Students
Transfer Students

From here we came up with a simplified site map after analyzing the exisitng site map and organizing the informtaion.

Brochure: Strong emphasis on visual design with use of high-end photography, illustrations/patterns and video as storytelling elements.

Informational: Strong emphasis on requirements, procedures or transactional.

Hybrid: Combination of both. For instance, the ‘Visit’ section. Transactional (sign up for an event) but still needs a marketing flare.

Its was time. All of research had been done and now the first wireframes were made. Designing for mobile with this many pages and sections was a challenge, and there we many things that had to be though through and changed along the way. Once we had flushed out enough we decided to test the prototype with current students.

Like any other wireframe test it had mixed reviews, but it was clear that we were on the right path as far as the way finding was concerned, and that's exactly what we were hoping for.

We went through a few rounds of testing with this wireframe prototype. Changes were made to things like confusing labels, navigation, and position of elements on the page.

Content types are what we called elements in the GATO cms that users could insert into the page. These are things like a video, icon and text, image, text and image and so on. This is what we were designing. Pre-made custom elements that when placed on a page make a website. Obviously this has limitations, but for a user that does not know how to code, it's magical.

So we changed forward with creating interesting and new content types using our wireframe designs as our bones. From there we made out high fidelity designs. The design was very similar to the grey scale wire frame designs we made. Step by step we made it better with a focus always on the ux and wayfinding.

From here I handed everything off to the marketing department and they flushed out the design on the brochure pages. The site will be going up in August 2018 with the new system and organized content.