The goal for this project was to review the news guide and the alternative news guides pages to ensure links are accurate and include news sources since the last update (e.g. Vancouver Sun on digital microfilm, etc.). However, this project grew to the extent that we decided to first focus solely on the News resources page. The Alternative News Guides page is planned for an update in Fall/Winter 2020.
Here you can see the former webpage and the auto-generated table of contents. Many links needed to be revised or updated and I saw that the headings could be revised to be more clear and intuitive.
Following consultations and discussions with the web page's author and SFU's Communications and Contemporary Arts liaison librarian, Sylvia Roberts, and SFU's UX Librarian, Janis Mackenzie, I was able to make positive changes. With their help, I studied heat maps, researched and compared similar webpages at other academic institutions, and tested links or found new resources to link to. Other tasks included adding annotations to links and image icons in order to help users to better navigate the page.
Example section of the news page with image icon and annotated links:
This experience not only provided me with an opportunity to study user experience (UX) and design thinking, but also experience with the process of updating a web page with a team. As a side project, I also copied the page source code into Brackets and coded a sticky menu onto the page, just to practice the HTML/CSS skills I learned from my Document Design class in the Spring 2020 school term (LIBR 556).
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With this project, I was able to experience:
> the UX process for updating a web page
> working with a team for content and style redesign
> using the Drupal 7 and 8 content management system (CMS)
This experience was very valuable as I am currently in the information and interaction design stream at the UBC iSchool. I hope to use some of the skills I have learned in my studies and research as well as apply them in my work as an executive member of the UBC UX Hub (UBC's UX club).