Keep Teaching

Keep Teaching is a site that was rapidly built to serve as a resource for UC San Diego faculty and professors who went remote amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Overview

Keep Teaching quickly became a high-profile website, but overtime has become impacted by different materials from a variety of hosts. The important information that faculty needed became decentralized, difficult to navigate to, and fairly dense.
Our workgroup was comprised of folks from the Teaching + Learning Commons and the Ed Tech Services (ETS) team at UC San Diego, since the current resources on the site were from these groups.

My role involved gathering information about our stakeholders, organizing the structure of the site, creating a wireframe of the redesign, establishing a style guide, and building out the new site in a CMS.

Timeline

  • Jul - Oct 2020

SKILLS

  • User Personas
  • Affinity Mapping
  • Wireframing
  • Prototyping

Tools

  • Axure
  • LucidChart
  • UCSD CMS -
    Hannon Hill Cascade

Goal

Since it's a highly advertised site, our goal for this redesign was to stand up a new site that centralizes the wide variety of information into organized, purposeful resources where faculty can quickly find the information they need that relates to remote teaching.

discovery phases

Since we had a short timeline before the website needed to be pushed out, we decided it would be best to look at the resources we already have. We gathered information from faculty who work closely with professors—helping them integrate digital technology in their courses, as well as improving their existing curriculum through learner-centered, evidence-based, and equitable teaching practices. 

pain points

Through meetings with our focus group, we concluded that our main stakeholders are faculty with varying needs.
‍
- Faculty who are overwhelmed with the amount of information available
- Faculty who are teaching remotely for the first time, or new to UC San Diego
- Faculty who have 1-2 quarters of experience teaching remotely, and are now looking for more intentional teaching strategies
- Shifting from emergency delivery to intentional design
- Looking for solutions to problems that arose during the emergency switch

Affinity Diagram

Now that we had a better understanding of who our audience was, we brainstormed ways that we could organize already existing resources into purposeful, concise information about remote teaching that faculty can easily navigate through. We created an affinity diagram, grouping related resources with each other and allowing these groupings to reveal relevant topics and subtopics. These guided the site’s information hierarchy and helped frame the redesigned navigation.

Prototype

We created a mid-fidelity prototype that demonstrated the redesigned navigation, easily accessible through the top navigation with dropdowns. Each main section became its own page with subsections. These subsections can be viewed from the navigation bar or by clicking one of the modules directly on a main section page.

Branding + Style Guide

Color Palette

We wanted to revamp the look and feel of the site by differentiating it from other UC San Diego sites, but aimed to keep UC San Diego's brand identity. We decided on playful gradients that incorporated some of the school's core and accent colors.

pattern overlay

To make the brand identity more dynamic, we added an overlay design element that features a repeated Geisel library pattern to create a geometric design. Examples of how we utilized this overlay are shown below.

Outcome

After rebuilding the site in UC San Diego’s chosen CMS, we gathered feedback from our focus group and were met with positive reviews! They praised the organization and ease of use of the new site. They highlighted that information was easily identifiable and were fond of the “Get Started” page.

They also gave feedback on further improvements and implementation for phase 2. These included adding a category for latest UC policy changes and an FAQ page.

These pages were not currently on Keep Teaching because we wanted the redesigned site to only have purposeful, well thought out resources. It was not in our bandwidth for phase 1 to generate new content that would’ve been concise and targeted for faculty and professors.

takeaways

This redesign was a new experience for me because it was the first time I worked with different groups of people. I’ve usually worked with clients who are part of the same team or department and it was interesting to see how different departments collaborated because they had the same audience and had a unified goal.

I also learned to value the importance of feedback in any form. Although we weren’t able to do any user testing because of our restricted timeline, I was able to focus more on what our focus group was saying throughout our process. We were able to do little iterations through this type of informal feedback and it was truly a first for me to experience rapid change in a project.