*The website redesign is live, at analytixindiana.com!
This case study reflects my main objective for my summer 2024 internship with AnalytiXIN, an initiative within the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership (CICP) funded via the Lilly Endowment. I redesigned the AnalytiXIN website to clearly represent its mission with an updated UI so that AnalytiXIN can more easily spread its influence in the future. I conducted a card sorting workshop, journey mapping workshop, revamped the AnalytiXIN site map, designed all mobile and desktop wireframes, and designed the high-fidelity responsive pages and subpages for Communities of Practice, Collaboration Hub, Faculty, and Privacy Policy.
While I was the only UI/UX Intern at CICP, AnalytiXIN had also contracted the PLAID Design Agency to work on the website, so I gained mentorship from not only my bosses but also the people at PLAID. I specifically worked a lot with and learned from Ben Heber, a Senior Visual Designer at PLAID, who gave me valuable feedback on how to level up my designs.
Despite the relevance of what AnalytiXIN does, their previous website did not highlight any of their notable "wins" and impact in Indiana as of 2024. Its dated, text-heavy UI and confusing copy resulted in users to be unable to grasp AnalytiXIN's mission. Potential partners have had to solely rely on the 2 AnalytiXIN members to explain their mission and impact via emails, calls, in-person meetings, and more. While this has worked in the past, not having an updated website is unsustainable for a future in which AnalytiXIN hopes to make even bigger waves in the state. Finally, a website with clear impact numbers can also potentially secure funding for future years, allowing for AnalytiXIN's continued growth.
The final redesign used the glass morphism styling of the homepage. I created the pages and subpage templates for Faculty Members, Individual Faculty, Communities of Practice, Common Place, and Privacy and Terms. For critiques, I got the help of Ben from THE PLAID AGENCY, who taught me a lot about how to "level up" my design by filling whitespace, Figma components, etc.!
The final redesign can also be viewed live, at analytixindiana.com!
The faculty members page is my favorite redesign!
It has a scrolling number animation to 56, to highlight the impact AnalytiXIN has had with hiring and recruiting. There are also blue field tags to show the faculty's diversity in research areas. There are testimonials for faculty, and how AnalytiXIN supports them.
Finally, there's a faculty directory, filterable by research area but not university so as not to create artificial silos by universities. Each card then links to their individual faculty page.
This is the revamped "Communities of Practice" page, group seminars on a particular advanced analytics topic with academia and industry joining the discussion. It's not too different structure-wise from the original Communities of Practice page, but it added facilitator page links to the "Additional Sessions" for users' understanding.
This is the "Common Place" page, which is AnalytiXIN-funded coworking spaces for its data analytics faculty. It includes what it is, what the space encompasses with a Google Maps plugin, and an interactive floor-plan of the office space. As a call-to-action, the page has contact links of the 3 facilitators for the space if you're a faculty looking to get access.
This is the page for every event people click on from the Communities of Practice page. It includes a summary, event details, and links to the facilitators' pages. Users can RSVP with the same plugin that was used on the old website.
Individual faculty page, includes university logo, related faculty profiles, biography, and links to publications or other websites. Individual pages over modal popups are better for SEO purposes.
Standard privacy policy and terms of use page, made more scannable with drop downs for the questions.
The first few weeks of my internship were dedicated to the discovery phase of AnalytiXIN as an organization and the old AnalytiXIN website. The discovery phase consisted of:
Understanding AnalytiXIN's story: what have AnalytiXIN's mission, purpose, and accomplishments been up until now?
Evaluating the current website: how well does the website tell AnalytiXIN's story?
Journey mapping workshop with stakeholders: what are the ideal pathways for stakeholders to learn about AnalytiXIN?
Prior to interviewing for the internship, I had never even heard of AnalytiXIN as an organization. Upon onboarding, though, I wished I had heard of it (and CICP by extension) as it gave me more hope for Indiana's future!
PowerPoint overview of the impact of AXIN as a nonprofit over time.
My boss had given me AnalytiXIN's reports to the Lilly Endowment over the past few years, assigning me to retell AnalytiXIN's story in my own words. I did then, and I'll do so again:
Because the rapid rise in advanced analytics is projected to transform Indiana's economy, especially in the healthcare and manufacturing sectors, AnalytiXIN's mission since 2021 is to recruit and connect university faculty specializing in AI and advanced analytics with industry partners, facilitating open collaboration between the industry and academia gap.
AnalytiXIN targets this mission with its 4 pillars:
After understanding the AnalytXIN story and mission, I needed to reevaluate the current website to see what should stay, what should go, and other design opportunities for a redesign. I wasn't just evaluating the website based on UX heuristics and general UX/UI, I also wanted to see how effectively the current website told the story of AnalytiXIN: their mission, their progress, and what's next.
Screenshot of UX/UI Evaluation of the previous site's "Life Sciences" page
After understanding the AnalytXIN story and mission, I wanted to conduct a short journey mapping workshop to understand the current state and ideal future state for joining AnalytiXIN in general. This was nowhere near as fleshed out as a real journey map due to time, but it gave me valuable insights nonetheless.
I conducted a 30-minute workshop with two internal stakeholders who have onboarded AnalytiXIN faculty and industry partners.
Introduction to journey mapping workshop, and a summary of results
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Journey mapping workshop results for faculty
Journey mapping workshop results for industry partner
The journey mapping workshop gave me more ideas on what an "ideal pathway" to joining AnalytiXIN could look like, and part of that was just through an improved website to serve as effective marketing. The frustrations with having an ineffective website meant that people at CICP outside of the AnalytiXIN team had to personally recruit and redirect people to AnalytiXIN, instead of just sending a link.
Now that I knew vaguely what to include for the new website, I wanted to overhaul how the information was organized. I knew the previous organization didn't make sense, as it was difficult to know where to go on the website. I accomplished this with a card sorting workshop, sitemapping, and wireframing.
I decided to use a card-sorting workshop to obtain user feedback. In this activity, I recruited internal stakeholders at CICP to sort features I wanted to keep for the new website. The categories created would then be used for page groupings and pages.
Introduction to card sorting workshop
Cards included in the workshop
Participant A's and Participant B's separate workshop
Combined card sorting results from Participants A and B
While there were some variances between the two participants' sortings, they were generally the same, with the groupings:
Now that I understand what groupings the AnalytiXIN team saw the wanted features under, I used this information to create a new site map and wireframes.
I designed desktop and mobile wireframes for all pages, reviewing them as I completed them with PLAID and my bosses. My structure for wireframing was:
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Wireframe Key
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Homepage Wireframe
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About Us
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Upskilling Resources
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Faculty page
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"Common Place" page
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"Life Sciences Data Asset" page
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"Diverse Projects" page
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"Communities of Practice" page
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Privacy Policy
The summit site was another mini-project separate from the overall website redesign I also designed wireframes for. AnalytiXIN was holding its first annual summit in 16 Tech in September, and needed a live site immediately.
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Summit site landing page
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Summit site registration page
The UX/UI design timeline in the corporate world was more condensed and expanded than any experience studio project I'd worked on during undergrad. It was condensed as I was working 40 hours per week and by myself, so I was churning out a lot of design! For example, all the wireframes took a week.
At the same time, the timeline stretched out due to contracts having to go back and forth for review, redlining, and actual signing. Contractual agreements were made more complicated due to CICP's status as a nonprofit, and AnalytiXIN's funding being derived from the Lilly Endowment.
My internship with AnalytiXIN was obtained through XTern, an Indiana-based tech internship program created by the CICP initiative Techpoint. As an "Xternship", it was super fun and gave me networking and community volunteer opportunities!
Picture of me with other Xterns after handing out popsicles to families!
On the professional side, it also directly led to two new amazing opportunities for me in the fall: a part-time UX product internship with Ascend Indiana, another initiative of CICP that focuses on bolstering Indiana's labor force, and a contract UX Designer position with THE PLAID AGENCY to support an influx of website redesign work!
Lastly, this internship also helped solidify my future in the UX industry: work with people who follow my philosophy of designing meaningful work. Designing to tell the story of AnalytiXIN was not only easy but exciting. Their vision of bridging the industry-practitioner gap in advanced analytics to make Indiana a better place strongly resonated with my philosophy that design brings people together.
