Over the course of three months, I worked alongside a team of student designers to address a major pain-point with the UW Office of Sustainability (OS) website: there is an abundance of quality information, but it is hard for students to specifically find what is useful to them. We began this pro-bono project by conducting student user interviews — aiming to understand their current perception of sustainability and identify any pain-points with the current website. There were two main challenges that we found.

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The first was that when students did go to the OS website, that they often had trouble finding the information they were looking for and settled for something similar or gave up entirely. We began to address this by conducting a card sort to gain a better understanding of our users' mental models regarding the information on the website. Taking this, we came up with two hypothesis for new navigation ideas, and tested them on a mix of users: four students, two parents, and one prospect student. From this, we found that 7/8 of the users preferred our second navigation, which limited search time by 30 seconds and amount of clicks-to-destination by four.

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The second main challenge that we found was: even among the students who were interested in sustainability, they rarely sought out resources on the OS website. This prompted us to create a "How Might We" statement: HMW design the OS website as an engaging hub for students who might not seek out sustainability resources on their own? After brainstorming, we narrowed down our idea to a short quiz, that would output personalized results on topics that students might not have known about (and thus wouldn't have searched for) previously. To create this, we started by creating an information architecture flow for a line of questioning, and then moved into creating a fidelity wireframe. After receiving feedback from our OS contact, we made iterations, tested with real users, and iterated again to finalize our product.