The journey of designing the VisComm website has been an interesting learning process. After weeks of conceptualizing, sketching, and planning, I finally dove into the practical phase by creating wireframes and putting them to the test. This process has been an enlightening experience, revealing insights into user experience and design principles that I hadn’t fully grasped before.

Creating wireframes felt like building the skeleton of a website. It was mapping out the structure, deciding where each element should be, and ensuring easy navigation.

One of the biggest challenges I faced was designing the drop-down menus. I wanted them to be functional without overwhelming the user and also, being able to get the drop-downs to work how I wanted them to with prototyping. Prototyping the buttons was another challenge. I wanted it to look nice, but also have easy usability. They needed to be visually appealing while clearly indicating their function.

Through user testing, I discovered that the overall design of the wireframes was simple and easy to navigate, and color changes upon hover significantly improved the user’s understanding and interaction. Testing the wireframes was where the real learning happened. It’s one thing to think you’ve created an intuitive design; it’s another to watch real users interact with it. Users struggled with certain navigation elements I thought were straightforward. This feedback was invaluable. It forced me to make changes based on real user behavior, not just my own ideas. This iterative process of designing, testing, and refining has underscored the importance of empathy in design. It’s not about creating something that I find appealing, but about creating something functional, accessible, and enjoyable for the user. This project has pushed me to think more critically, to embrace feedback, and to continuously strive for improvement.

The sitemap acted as the foundation for my design decisions. It helped me map out the overall information and define what pages were needed, and how they connected. As I moved from sketches to digital wire frames, I referred back to both the sitemap and sketches to ensure consistency. While the sketches and sitemap guided me through the process. While I was designing the wireframes, I realized some of my original sketches and ideas weren’t needed and would make the overall layout more complicated, and I was able to better align my design decisions with the user’s goals.

Each user had different difficulties when navigating the task. The prospective student had easy navigation for each task and thought it was straightforward. Parent users also thought it was straightforward, thought the subheadings maybe should be a different size to not get mixed up about what the primary page was about. Current student user had easy navigation, with all the tasks except for finding the alumni portfolios. The first action they took when looking for alumni portfolios was to look in the students tab under student work. Their second action was to look in the students tab under resources. I could probably fix the hesitation with finding alumni information by making it a page in the navigation bar.

By this testing, I realized each user has a different perspective on where certain information should be. I think I might make the alumni information sections its own tab or page, in order to make navigation easier without user hesi