MATERIALS SCIENCE
& ENGINEERING
Redesign of Departmental Website
IN-HOUSE PROJECT
MATERIALS SCIENCE
& ENGINEERING
As a communications assistant, I supported the redesign of the Materials Science & Engineering departmental website to improve clarity, accessibility, and long-term maintainability. Academic department websites often serve many audiences at once: from prospective students and current students to faculty and staff while still maintaining institutional-wide branding, guidelines and stakeholder expectations. However, much of the formatting is frequently shaped by legacy structures that leads to fragmented content.
This project focused on restructuring the site’s overall architecture and modernizing the visual/interaction design to better support navigation and comprehension. Working within institutional constraints and stakeholder feedback, I aimed to create a clear, scalable web system that communicates the department’s identity while remaining within institutional guidelines.
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This project is currently slated for public launch in Spring 2026.
FOCUS
Institutional Web Design
Communication Design
Accessibility & Usability
Front-End Systems
Stakeholder Collaboration
CREDIT
NIKI JENNINGS (LEAD)
KAI HELMS
THE CHALLENGE
Departmental websites operate for many different users which leads to shifting audiences and complex systems. This project required reorganizing a fragmented system of pages that lacked consistent structure and voice, while retaining strict university branding and technical guidelines. Faculty, staff, and administrators brought differing expectations around content depth and presentation, requiring constant negotiation and alignment. At the same time, pages needed to serve multiple audiences (prospective students, current students, researchers, and external partners) often within the same navigation system. Balancing accessibility compliance, long-term maintainability, and real-world content ownership, all while learning and working within WordPress, added additional layers of complexity.
THE INSIGHTS
Consistent page layouts, content structures, and writing patterns reduced cognitive load (both for users and stakeholders), improved navigation clarity, and allowed users to find information more quickly and confidently. These systems also enabled faster page development and ease the way for future updates. The project highlighted the reality of institutional design work: optimal design solutions are not always feasible and stakeholder needs sometimes need to take precedence. However, even within these constraints, thoughtful design decisions can incrementally improve clarity, accessibility, and user experience. Effective UX in this context is less about ideal outcomes and more about strategic improvement within given boundaries.
FINAL SCREENS
The following is a selected sample of final screens. In total, over 60 individual pages and 10+ sub-sites were redesigned or substantially restructured as part of this project.
Standardized page headers with consistent copy, updated imagery, and clearly defined calls to action.
Previously buried departmental statistics were reorganized within the page hierarchy. Additionally, introduced revamped page links with high-quality imagery for high-traffic pages.
Navigation was updated to improve clarity and usability, with simplified menu structures and more descriptive page naming.
Contact information was standardized for greater visibility, with new dynamic content patterns guiding users to related university resources and clearer copy resolving common issues like parking.