Summary

Problem

The previous Georgia Tech Parking & Transportation Services (PTS) website provided parking facilities and services, but suffered from inefficiency and unresponsiveness. The campus website migration to WordPress during the summer of 2022 presented the opportunity to research and design to develop the site into a more modern and engaging user experience.

Solution

The redesigned PTS website addresses the inefficiency and unresponsiveness users experienced by providing consistent and streamlined information architecture as well as responsive and intuitive design systems. By migrating to WordPress and developing a component library, each page has increased accessibility to enable stakeholders to iterate upon the design and update content to reflect the latest information.

Define

Georgia Tech Parking & Transportation Services (PTS) is a department that contributes to campus experience by providing parking facilities and campus mobility services. With over 338,000 sessions in the past year, the PTS page is the most visited site in the GT network as it provides parking locations and permits and shuttle routes and schedules. Though the site was updated a few years ago, it fell into inefficiency and unresponsiveness due to the use of Drupal as the content management system. With the campus migration to WordPress in 2022, my team and I were able to use this transition to revitalize the PTS site to create a more engaging experience to aid users in accessing information and accomplishing tasks.

How might the Georgia Tech Parking & Transportation Services website be redesigned to create a modern, engaging user experience?

Research

Competitive Analysis

Goals

Understand trends and practices of university parking and transportation website design to develop redesign implications

Methods

Audit parking and transportation websites of leading universities to understand site mapping, navigation, layouts, and content

Findings

Synthesize redesign implications and sitemap structural changes to pitch to the PTS team of what the redesigned site might look like

Duke

Princeton

Texas A&M

Web Analytics

Goals

Learn how users navigate to the site, what devices users use, and what behaviors users exhibit when completing tasks

Methods

Google Analytics to examine trends across 180,000+ site-use sessions between May 2021 and May 2022

Findings

User behaviors, primary tasks, potential usability issues with the previous site, and outdated content to be removed

Design

Requirements

To initiate design, I led my team in presenting research findings to the PTS department to develop actionable design requirements for the redesigned site. These design requirements guided the conception, development, and evaluation of the redesign.

Cohesive

New visual identity that coheres with the Georgia Tech brand

Intuitive

New structure to enable users to more easily navigate the site

Replicable

Reusable when handed-off for content and management

Responsive

Remain responsive as it scales with content across multiple devices

Information Architecture

Following the design requirements, I collaborated with my team to develop a new information architecture to reflect the competitive analysis findings and web analytics. I presented the new information architecture to the PTS team through a sitemap to receive approval before wireframing the new site.

Wireframes

After receiving approval for the information architecture, I developed general wireframes for desktop and mobile versions of essential pages. The wireframes established a series of modular components to build in WordPress to develop the redesigned site to be hand off to future developers to expand and maintain the site.

Design System

After wireframing the modular components, I led the establishment of a design system in adherence with Georgia Tech brand guidelines. I presented the site's new design system to the PTS team to receive their approval before styling the modular components to build the new site.

Color

Imagery

Typography

Final Design

After developing the revised information architecture, wireframes, and design system, I led the development of the new PTS website by utilizing WordPress to build the pages and migrate previous content. The goal of this development was to achieve a fully-functional website to deploy before the start of the 2022-2023 school year.

Home

The home page was redesigned to provide clear PTS notifications through a regularly-updated announcement banner at the top of the page. The redesign placed greater emphasis on providing actionable shortcuts to commonly used PTS services through the prominent incorporation of icon-based buttons. Many sections and links on the previous home page design were removed to provide a more streamlined experience without distractions.

Parking

Parking pages were redesigned to provide clear paths for each user group to increase efficiency in learning parking information and accomplishing intended parking tasks. This redesign reduced information to provide a clear, curated experience to meet the needs of each group. To improve the effectiveness of these changes, call-to-action links were added to each parking action and visual maps were created.

Transit

Transit pages were redesigned to provide clear understanding of times, routes, and conditions in which transit operates at Georgia Tech. This placed greater emphasis on visual route maps and updated timetables that were readable on desktop and mobile devices. Previous content was condensed and restructured to provide a more streamlined experience when looking up relevant transit information.

Reflect

Stakeholders

I was fortunate to gain insight into working with stakeholders to understand their visions and requirements while meeting the needs of end-users. Though this requires balance and trade-offs, it was rewarding execute stakeholders' visions while improving the experience of end-users. This allowed me to understand how to develop a design and content management system to hand off to future designers and content managers to update and improve the site.

Thanks

I am glad to have contributed to the improvement of a pivotal web service that directly affects members throughout the Georgia Tech community by creating a more efficient and responsive experience. I would like to thank the Georgia Tech PTS team for providing the opportunity to redesign their website as well as the supporting staff at the Office of Information Technology for the insights and critiques they offered in the research and design process.