Projects
As part of a design challenge, my team and I were tasked to redesign the homepage and a section of our choice from the NSA website. After analyzing various webpages on their site, we determined that the press room needed the most work. Using our design knowledge we overhauled the homepage and press room page to be more visually appealing and easier to navigate.
Many testers struggled to navigate the website without the assistance of windows shortcuts. This tells us that the current page layout is not easy enough to navigate and users need to use other methods to find what they are looking for, which less tech-savvy users may not know about.
Through a heuristic analysis, we found 4 primary issues with the website.
In the press room section, we added a button at the bottom to allow people to access the press room landing page from the homepage area, as previously the only way to get to the press room landing page was through the navbar.
In addition, we also redesigned each sub-area to be consistent with each other. Previously, each area had a different way of displaying their information and different filter layout. Our first iteration of each area had each area homogenized so they all looked and functioned identically.
The press room landing page saw more significant changes. The original homepage made poor use of the white space making it look empty and they used 2 different card shapes each subsection. To better layout the homepage, we homogenized the cards and added a small description to make sure viewers understand what is in each subsection.
Our initial prototypes did not change the homepage a whole lot. The primary change we made was to make the default view dark mode because it matches with its current color palette better.
We kept a lot of the current stylization elements that they currently had such as their font and colors. The primary change we made was adjusting their colors to meet WCAG AAA standards. We also decided to change the site's homepage to dark mode because we thought it would look more sleek and complimented the colors better.
With the completion of the first iteration of our prototype, we ran a set of user tests. Many users expressed that they enjoyed our version of the site over the original. This was proven true because they had no major issues navigating our version of the site. We also did an AB test asking users which variant of the homepage they preferred. A majority of the testers stated that they preferred the static design over the complex one, which we decided to go with.
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Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the outcome. I was able to cover just about all the changes I wanted to make to this site. Although I do wish I could have used some of the components I created in the final iterations, I understand what some users meant by it being overwhelming. To me, this showed me that there was a difference between what I thought was cool versus what the users need. This is something I will take into consideration on future projects.