Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts

Project Lead (Project Management, IA/UI/UX Design, Art Direction)

At The New School, I manage the website for Eugene Lang College, the university’s liberal arts school. I design and build out all new features, oversee usability issues, and produce/oversee new content.

Case Study:

When I started to work on the site, it had just been redesigned. While it looked visually stunning (especially for a college website, which is often an oxymoron), information was difficult to find. I set out to restructure the site’s information architecture with the user in mind. In other words, I wanted to make the architecture reflect user paths rather than the school’s bureaucracy and administrative organization.

What I ended up doing was splitting up an otherwise bloated Academics section into Academics and Student life. I then created a sidebar system that would relate similar pages based on results from informal card sorts. In the end, content is primarily located in certain places, but easier to find from other pages on the site.

What we had, in the very end, was a template and system for creating and managing Student Life sections at other college websites at The New School:

Process (simplified, of course):

Above is a graphic illustrating the process of splitting up a bloated section of the website into two cleaner sections. The scribbled up diagrams illustrate what it is like to sit through meetings with Deans and top administrative officials at a university.