During my summer internship with the Georgia Tech Office of Information Technology, I worked to redesign the GT Parking & Transportation Services website in preparation for the upcoming 2022 - 2023 school year.
The previous Georgia Tech Parking & Transportation Services (PTS) website provided essential parking facilities and mobility services, but suffered from inefficiency and unresponsiveness for users across the university. The campus-wide website migration to WordPress during the summer of 2022 presented the opportunity to engage in the process of research and design to develop the PTS site into a more modern and engaging user experience.
The redesign of the Georgia Tech PTS website directly addresses the inefficiency and unresponsiveness users experienced from the previous site by providing consistent and streamlined information architecture as well as responsive and intuitive design systems. By migrating the PTS site to WordPress and developing a cohesive component library, each page has increased accessibility to enable stakeholders to iterate upon the design and update the content to reflect the latest university information.
Georgia Tech Parking & Transportation Services (PTS) is an essential university department that contributes to the overall campus experience by providing parking facilities and campus mobility services, which include shuttle systems, carpool programs, and micro-mobility networks. With over 338,000 user sessions in the 2021-2022 academic year, the PTS website is the most visited site in the Georgia Tech network as it provides affiliates of the university and visiting guests access to parking facility locations and permits as well as daily shuttle routes and schedules. Though the PTS site design was last updated a few years ago, it had since fallen into a state of inefficiency and unresponsiveness due to the convoluted usage of Drupal as the primary content management system. With the campus-wide site migration to WordPress in the summer of 2022, my team at the Office of Information Technology and I were able to capitalize on this transition to revitalize the design of the PTS website to create a more modern and engaging user experience to aid visitors in accessing important information and accomplishing essential tasks.
The goal of the competitive analysis was to understand the trends and practices that define the design of university parking and transportation websites to develop redesign implications to present to the PTS team.
To conduct our competitive analysis, we audited the parking and transportation websites of four other leading universities to understand their approach to site mapping, navigation, page layouts, and content.
The competitive analysis enabled us to synthesize a series of tangible redesign implications and sitemap structural changes that we then pitched to the PTS team as a vision of what the redesigned site might look like.
The goal of understanding the web analytics was to learn how users navigate to the site, what devices users use to access the site, and what behaviors users exhibit when completing tasks on the site.
To understand the web analytics of the previous PTS site, we utilized Google Analytics to examine the trends across 180,000 site-use sessions between May 2021 and May 2022.
The results of the web analytics demonstrated user behaviors, primary tasks they seek to complete, potential usability issues with the previous site, and outdated content to be removed from the redesigned site.
To initiate the design process, I led my team at OIT in presenting our research findings to members of the PTS department to develop a series of actionable design requirements for the redesigned site. These design requirements were the key guiding factors throughout the conception, development, and evaluation of our redesign.
The redesign should have content that is rewritten for concision to improve user readability.
The redesign should have a new visual identity that coheres with the Georgia Tech brand.
The redesign should have a new structure to enable users to more easily navigate the site.
The redesign should remain responsive as it scales with more content across multiple devices.
The redesign should be replicable once handed off to others for content and management.
Following the establishment of the design requirements, I collaborated with my team at OIT to develop a new information architecture to reflect the findings from our competitive analysis and web analytics. I then presented the new information architecture to the PTS team in the form of a sitemap to receive their approval before wireframing the redesigned site.
After receiving the PTS department's approval for the revitalized information architecture, I developed generalized wireframes for desktop and mobile versions of essential pages. The wireframes were intended to establish a series of modular components that would be built in WordPress to efficiently develop the redesigned site to be later handed off to future OIT developers to expand and maintain the site.
After wireframing the modular components of the PTS site, I led the team in establishing a design system that was in adherence with the established Georgia Tech brand guidelines. I then presented the site's potential design system to the PTS team to receive their verification before systematically applying the styling to the modular components to build out the new site.
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