For my second year university project I was put into a group and told to create an alternative website for the Manchester Metropolitan University Information and Communications department, which is the department I study at. My role within the team was as lead designer, and co-develop the entire website with another web developer on my team
The tasks I had to carry out throughout the course of the project involved, creating basic wireframes of each page, starting of at simple sketches all the way to fully detailed mock-ups in softwares such as Axure and Sketch 3. And on the development side my job was to convey the chosen design into lines of code with the help of another web developer and make sure everything was responsive and matched the project brief
Although on first thoughts this project looked simple to create, there was a few critical problems I had to overcome in terms of the design and development to help successfully create this website. As you can see below the phone on the left is displaying the current website homepage for the Manchester Metropolitan University Information and Communications department and the phone on the right is displaying the alternative one I created.
Dealing with a heavy load of content meant creating a design displayed the important information for our users to access whilst creating a friendly, fun and vibrant user experience to create an effective alternative website. Although the was a difficult task, throughout the design stages I became more confident in understanding my users perspective and individual reasons for visiting the website, which helped intern narrow my design ideas to the most effective
My vision for this project was to create a experience that allowed users take important information about the department and about the lifestyle of the university all without knowing they was on a formal academic website and I think this was achieved in the end.
Here are a few of the icons that was used throughout the website. These were used mostly to represent the different courses and student life at the department
