New Life for the HDAE Websites
A Closer Look at the Redesign Process
IN 2019, WITH THE NEW UCSB VISUAL IDENTITY rolling out across campus for a year or more, the time had come to redesign the HDAE website. Our departmental sites, although still functional, were beginning to look and feel a little tired. So many processes that had once been handled by hand or through the mail or phone (housing applications, maintenance requests, etc.) had gone online in the last iteration of the H&RS site (2013) whereas today almost all of what we do is accessed through a browser. The importance of a user friendly, functional, and attractive site has become critical to how we do business.
In the last go-around we hand designed all of the pages from wireframe through final coding. Now a standardized web template is available through Public Affairs offering a consistent structure and look for campus departments to provide information to our growing audience. Many areas have already adapted the new web form; but being the largest division on campus with several robust sites a redesign was not going to be a straightforward undertaking.
We started by pulling together a steering committee of stakeholders from several key units (see member list at bottom). Early on we decided to separate our once central H&RS site (now HDAE) into several sub-sites with their own domain names. Campus Dining was just beginning to blend retail units from across campus with our own residential dining units so it made sense for them to have their own home. Conference & Hospitality Services was already on its own which left Housing and our physical residences to also find their way to an individual site. It’s easy to lose sight of the actual user when developing websites so we had to keep coming back to what is important for someone visiting our sites versus what is important for us as a department. This can vary greatly. Users want to get to the information they need as quickly as possible and departments want to talk about themselves. Hence, the importance of ‘user-friendly’.
We realized we were also going to need an overarching ‘administrative’ site to capture HDAE as a whole. We weren’t redesigning all of the sites in HDAE (TPS, Campus Store, etc) but we needed to let people know who we all are and what we do. This was the ‘low hanging fruit’ in the venture and we were able to pull this information together in a few months and launched the overall Housing, Dining & Auxiliary Enterprises site in January of 2021.
By this point the Steering Committee had whittled down to a smaller ‘working’ group and with the help of several web development and project management tools (Miro, Adobe XD, Asana) the individual sites began to take shape. We didn’t want to just recreate our existing site, we wanted to improve and streamline it because it had gotten bloated over the years. We also didn’t want to assume we knew the best way to design for our audience as things had changed in the seven years since we last did this. Instead we asked. Students, staff, parents…focus groups and unit meetings. We moved around post-it notes (digitally) until better navigational flows began to emerge. We poured through our Google Analytics data to see what areas were being most viewed on our current sites and what areas could be removed. We also tried to get to know our audience better which is always a challenge but one of the most important pieces of information.
Summer Conferences had been canceled due to COVID-19 so the core of their team dove in with great aplomb and creativity to bring the Conference & Hospitality Services site you see today to life. This was the next site to ‘go live’ in early summer 2021 to a great breakfast party celebration complete with ‘EDIT’ tshirts…an inside Drupal reference (see image).
Mandy, the third member of our MarCom design team of three took a new job in late spring so Julie Levangie and I divided the workload to get the final two sites, housing and dining respectively, launched before school started in the fall. With devoted input from Marisol Gomez, Eriko MacDonald, Fern Lightfoot and Jill Horst the dining site slowly came together as Julie was corralling and designing the massive content that made up the housing site. A new search filter was developed and programmed to help users compare and contrast our many varied residences. We’re hoping this will be an effective tool for students and parents alike while trying to make sense of the array of housing options.
And finally…on the very last day of the summer…August 31st…with the incredible help from Mike Franklin and the ARIT team (full list below)…we gave birth to the last of our four children and launched the Campus Housing site and the Campus Dining site to the world. We are as excited as exhausted and relieved.
This project was truly the work and input of so many people over a roughly two-year time period. We couldn’t have done it without the patience and expertise of master programmer Carlos Paz and the facilitation of Monica Pessino…both of Ocean O’ Graphics (Marine Sciences). They guided us through the many twists and turns of coding a gi-normous web undertaking. Thanks to everyone else who has taken part in the project and we sincerely hope the rest of you enjoy the final result. It looks a lot like the other sites on campus…which is a good thing!. ;)
Steering Committee: Gary Scott, Lauren Weiner, Julie Levangie, Mandy Yoshida, Eric Zobel, Becky Villaneda, Becky Ahern, Kristine Lehman
Conferences Web Team: Lauren Weiner, Julie Miller, Phoebe Frisch-Gebhart, David Sanders
ARIT Web Support: Mike Franklin, Alex Mook, John Niessen, Jim Webb, Masha Aksenova, Stephen Waits, Denise Saludares
Dining Web Team: Marisol Gomez, Eriko MacDonald, Fern Lightfoot, Jill Horst, Ron Varenchik, Robbie Wright, Derrick Duong, Danielle Sinclair